free/inexpensive community data

July 11, 2008 8:10 AM

Tips on free/inexpensive RSS community data

I'm looking for free or inexpensive sources of data (like RSS feeds, APIs) that I can grab and place on a website, formatted as I wish. Some examples would be city/town info, school info, real estate, business addresses, news, sports, utility, population and other information. I also need weather but I already know several RSS feeds for this. They don't all have to be from one source and I don't expect to find everything. I have heard of Onboard, but it's outside of my budget. A lot of what is on city-data.com is great, but that comes from Onboard. I'm interested in U.S. and international data, but the U.S. data is much more important.

posted by fx3000 to technology (4 comments total)

I just heard about FreeBase via Watching the Growth Of Walmart (via tecznotes).

Looks pretty cool.
posted by fishfucker at 10:43 AM on July 11, 2008

wow, that walmart video is highly recommended too -- very cool.
posted by fishfucker at 10:45 AM on July 11, 2008

So, to save you a bit of time (well, the 5 minute glance i had -- sorry for not having more experience with Freebase, but since you hadn't gotten any other responses yet ...) essentially Freebase provides an API that you can grab JSON results from using some kind of proprietary/custom query language called MQL (metaweb query language). It looks a little xquery-ish - dunno, since I don't have a ton of xml experience. There's a lot of data that looks kinda pointless -- big gaps, I think, but still, free! So hey.
posted by fishfucker at 10:53 AM on July 11, 2008

Google gadgets are available to place on websites should be a good place. Dapper and widgetbox, yahoo pipes are other app places where you can either choose from the community or customize to your own preference.
posted by radsqd at 1:05 PM on July 11, 2008