There's no doubt that there's tremendous value in free data, and there's probably a lot of it on the web. Unfortunately, since we don't yet have a decent search engine, it can be very hard to find. The InfoChimps have therefore decided to collect it at infochimps.org. The site says:
The infochimps.org community is assembling and interconnecting the world's best repository for raw data -- a sort of giant free allmanac, with tables on everything you can put in a table. Built by data nerds, used by data nerds, it's a central source for the information you need to power the projects the world needs.
It's very early days, and there's no good way to find things except by browsing... and yet there are already too many sets for browsing to be a good idea. (There are tags, but you can only select one tag at a time.)
Selected highlights from the data include:
* Full game state for every play of every baseball game in 2007, majors and minors.
* Word frequencies in written text for ~800,000 word tokens (British National Corpus)
* All the Wikipedia infoboxes, turned on their side and put into a table for each infobox type.
If it had what I was looking for (UK-US Exchange rates over the past 20 years) then I'd be a happy bonobo, but if it's there, I can't see it....
