Data, data, everywhere free data… At least in the Guardian’s Data Store – Tons of data, all free and all delivered via Google Spreadsheets (get your mashup engines started)

guardian.co.uk – Data Store

“What is this page?

Data from the Guardian

We have compiled our top sets of publicly-available data for you to use free. Explore the links below, visualise and mash them together. Then, let us know what you've done.

…

And more US data from the Obama’s America page;

For example, here’s some US unemployment data;

Data Store - How to get data out of the Data Store

“…

The aim of the Data Store is to make important data more accessible to people. With that in mind, we are publishing the facts and figures using tools that anyone can use for whatever needs they have.

You'll find a link within each data page to a spreadsheet where you can see the data. We've chosen Google Spreadsheets to host these data sets as the service offers some nice features for people who want to take the data and use it elsewhere.

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A key reason for choosing Google Spreadsheets to publish our data is not just the user-friendly sharing functionality but also the programmatic access it offers directly into the data. There is an API that will enable developers to build applications using the data, too.

We explained how this works before when we published the America 2009 series in January to test out the concept. You can find detailed information about the Google Spreadsheets Data API on Google Code.

We'll be looking at other methods for making data we publish useful both for people and for machines, but we'd love to get some insights from you, as well. Tell us how we can make data more useful.

…”

Data… Man, I love data! So much the better when it’s free and accessible via an API…

(via Chris Webb’s BI Blog - Guardian Data Store - free data, and some ideas on how to play with it)