As a developer, I find it much easier to design and build entire applications than it is to fill them. Much like it would be easier for me to build this blog than it would be for me to fill it with blog entries (obviously). With that in mind, the next question is, where can I get some data? Lately, this has been answered with mashups. Mashups are usually cool because the data they are mashing up is really rich, and is being displayed in a whole new, hopefully useful, way.
If you aren't into the typical mashups, or just want an alternative, there are other ways to get lots of content, usually for free. With a little searching, I found these really rich data sources.
Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Database_download) and Wikimedia (http://download.wikimedia.org/): The entire wikipedia and wikimedia databases are available to download. If you don't like the way these sites are setup, or think you can do better, grab that data and fire it up.
IMDb (http://www.imdb.com/interfaces): Yeah, that site that you go to for all your movie queries? All its data is belonging to us. Well, you know what I mean.
IPHostInfo (http://www.hostip.info/dl/index.html): If you wanted to build a service that translated ip addresses into geo information, this is your data source.
DMoz (http://rdf.dmoz.org/): The giant database of links organized by category. This is a pretty popular database and is updated regularly.
MusicMoz (http://musicmoz.org/xml/): MusizMoz is to music as IMDb is to movies.
WoWIDb (http://hem.passagen.se/xstatique/): For you WoW fans out there, this is a database of known items found in the game.
The Web's Most COMPLETE, Updated Daily (http://www.hometheaterinfo.com/dvdlist.htm): A comprehensive list of dvds, with genres, ratings, production companies, and other useful data.
And, if that's not enough, here are two more sources that aren't as popular in the computer world:
Drugs@FDA (http://www.fda.gov/cder/drugsatfda/datafiles/default.htm): This is the drug database from the FDA.
Pseudomonas Genome Database (http://www.pseudomonas.com/download.jsp): A database of genomes or something.
This is just an example of all the data available out there, and some really cool mashups could be built with this data. But, you should check the license information for each source before you get started.
Jesse Foster | jf26028