This morning, the NPR online team launched the NPR API, or Application Programming Interface, to make NPR content freely and publicly available.

So what is an API and why should you care? From a technology perspective, an API is a channel that allows one application (such as a website) to share information and procedures with another website or application. A perfect example is a Google Map mashup. Any website or blog can embed a Google Map and plot their own data on top of it; for example, Trulia plots homes for sale in DC on a Google Map.

From the larger perspective of freedom of information, an API is a much bigger idea. It means that our content can appear anywhere, in almost any format. Anyone with an idea and some basic web skills can select, repurpose, and embed our content on the web, on a desktop computer, or even on a handheld device. Fans of David Sedaris, NPR Election coverage, or Ketzel Levine’s Talking Plants no longer have to search all over our website to find their favorite content. Audio, text, and photos can now come to them now as an embeddable blog widget, a Facebook application, or any other format they can imagine. I should mention that only a few of these widgets exist so far, but the API is out there, so it’s only a matter of time before people start building them.

The UK Guardian and BBC have experimented with very limited APIs. The BBC makes available feeds of short program descriptions and its program schedule, but it does not make its full content available. Back in May, the New York Times announced that it would be making all of its content publicly available via an API. As far as I know, NPR is the first major media organization to launch an API to make all of its content available.

NPR’s Zach Brand and Daniel Jacobson were the leaders of the project, and here are the full credits :

There were a ton of contributors to this new API with the primary technical architect being Harold Neal. Other major contributors include Joanne Garlow, Jason Grosman, Tony Yan, Ivan Lazarte, Stephanie Oura, Ben Hands, Shain Miley, Lindsay Mangum, Sugirtha Solai, Todd Welstein and Vida Logan, and others.