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Let us now praise data dumps

As someone who deeply appreciates raw data and admires those who wrangle it, I have to give a shoutout to my fellow travelers out there:
  • Big bunches of ripe bananas to the primates over at Infochimps, "a community to assemble and interconnect a giant free almanac, with tables on everything you can put in a table—things like a century of hourly weather, every major league baseball game, decades of stock prices, or every US patent filing." Check out the (still small but interesting) visualization gallery.
  • Swivel, which aims to "make it easy for everyone to collaborate and explore data together — because better informed people make better decisions: in voting booths, in corporate boardrooms and at neighborhood meetings." A worthy undertaking, and the site's getting a lot of press. (Sadly, the graphics it offers are little more than rudimentary.)
Now that I'm an aspiring Tufte, I'll definitely be keeping an eye out for more of these troves.
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