The right information in the right place just changes your life or The Jerry Maguire post

The quote to keep in mind

"On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life.

On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other."

Stewart Brand

Now, a bit of background

Over the past 18 months, there has been an explosion in data visualisation on the web (a visualisation of this explosion might be done at some point). Part of this explosion has been the expansion of freely available data sources and tools to visualise these data sources. Never has it been easier to get hold of data and do something with it.

From what I've come across to date (and so not an exhaustive list), there are quite a few free (typically, open source) tools and date sources out there:

Free Tools

1. r & associated packages to accomplish specific tasks
2. ManyEyes (by IBM)
3. Verifiable
4. Processing
5. OECD Data Visualiser - become your very own Hans Rosling
   
6. Charles (this records the information that is being sent by your internet browser to the website, so you can replicate this information in r or other programs).
7. Dapper (I haven't tried this one out)
   

Data sources:

Unofficially, anything on the web that is in a half decent structure - either as a table or a csv (full post on using r & rCurl for some of these to follow).

Officially, lots of things have an API, here are a few:

1. TheyWorkForYou (UK MPs information)
2. Yahoo (lots of different apis - the placename one is nice)
3. Twitter

There are also sources where data is stored in some form or other:

1. The Guardian has also started a data store which attempts to liberate data from various places. This includes crowdsourcing the MPs expenses.
2. The Office for National Statistics
3. Transport for London
4. National Rail
5. Wikipedia (great if you need a list of, say Zone 1 Tube Stations)

And there are also lots of people creating and critiquing visualisations:

1. FlowingData
2. Junk Charts
3. Data Visualisation
4. Indexed (not strictly data)

All of these lists are in no way exhaustive, and will be added to over time.