04.09.08
Information is Power, and Power Aint Free
Bret Taylor wrote a post that started a whole chain of articles elsewhere… About how there should be a free Online Database of well Data. Data for everything.
I use the CIA Factbook for a lot of the information I just want for myself. It never fails to impress people when I site the CIA factbook on a power point slide.
That said I use all sorts of other bits of data for a lot of my SEO. I mine YouTube, Flickr, Amazon, Google Base, the CIA Fact book, Yahoo answers… There is no shortage of places to get information to be queried molded and made in to content that is of use to an audience. That is how I make $200 before I wake up in the morning. I bend shape, mold, "Pipe" and mash data to create pages that are timely useful, and move product or ads.
If that becomes to easy I get put out of business. I’m not opposed to that in general terms, but here is the problem.
Wikipedia already contains a huge number of gross errors, and gets quoted as fact a lot of times when it isn’t. If that were the case for things like Market Data, or Traffic, or things that we make critical some what automated decisions on, the data would have to be much more accurate than Wiki has ever been.
One of my favorite examples was when a co-worker pulled an entire table from Wiki with out reading it first, and it listed the most watched events in Television History and one of them was "So-And-So Munches the Black Cock". (Name removed for that person’s benefit.
Sure these often get caught, but I know that some of the entries I have made are only about 85% right but are better than the 0% right that they were when I started.
Pulling data that was created commercially, and possibly buying data that you can sleep at night know it is accurate "enough" and that people haven’t maliciously modified it, is worth it.
You get what you pay for, and if you get it for free, it is probably worthless.
Besides just think of the spam sites that would pop up if such a tool existed.
This is a response to:
Sarah Perez: Where to Find Open Data on the Web
Deepak Singh: Web as platform: Bret Taylor on Open Data
Jon : Bret Taylor’s DataPedia
Hash: It’s Always About the Data
Ryan Stewart: Wikipedia for data would be awesome for GPS/Mapping
Dan Farber: Open-sourcing factual data, Wikipedia style
Sample of Free Data in use:
Check the Flickr and YouTube Images on the side of www.xyhd.tv ; www.Yentering.com ; and type any term in to www.makemeaninja.com/news/