some fun info-grabbing projects

[Aaron Swartz]

As most readers probably know, I've been working on watchdog.net, a
free software political data and action site. Anyway, we've been
getting a lot of good suggestions for data sets to look into and parse
and I thought I'd share them with the list, in case anyone was
interested in picking some of them up. I've put them up on a wiki
page, so that you can claim the things you're interested in:

http://watchdog.jottit.com/volunteer

Here's a sample of the sort of things that are up there now: lobbying
records, IRS income statistics, trademark database, the census,
environmental toxins, etc. (And do let me know if you have additional
suggestions!) For each of them, I've tracked down and gotten a copy of
the data; we just need someone to parse it into something sensible.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, do sign up for our
volunteers mailing list:

http://groups.google.com/group/watchdog-volunteers/subscribe

Anyway, please take a look at the volunteer page and see if anything
strikes your fancy. There's an amazing amount of good data out there;
we just need help making sense of all of it.