Today, a story on Techmeme caught our eye. It was entitled "We Need a Wikipedia for data," and the article, written by X-Googler Bret Taylor, discussed the difficulty of finding open data sets on the internet, something which could spur innovation, allowing programmers to build new applications the likes of which have never been seen before. What was interesting about this story, in addition to, obviously, the concept of a Data Wiki itself, was the amazing and insightful commentary around this concept, not just on the blog, but all over the net, something which led to the discovery of some pretty good data sources that are already available.
In Bret's story, he mentioned some of the common data sources currently available, like the US Census Bureau's map data and the Reuters corpus, but his commenters came up with a few more. (See? This is why blog comments matter).
In addition, as CNet and Ryan Stewart's blog spread the story, more people chimed in with suggestions. And of course, the Hacker News guys had some more ideas themselves.
So what did everyone come up with? A lot of data sources are already freely available on the net, as it turns out, if you just know where to look. Here's a summary, do you have anything to add?
