Finding open data on the web is sometimes a hard job. Especially if you haven’t realy a clear vision of the data you need. So what’s out there if you have a lazy sunday afternoon, Flash / Processing / Python or Arduio set up and going, a boost of creativity but a lack of data do visualize? In the stage of scribbling down ideas and creating sketches of those slick interfaces it’s a show-stopper to go trough google.com to find the dataset you want in the fileformat you need.

Exactly for this case I’ve launched DataZoo. It’s a repository of links to open available datasets. It’s maintained by the community itself and everybody is welcome to contribute to the list.

The application was built using delicious.com as the aggregation engine of links tagged with “datazoo” and the feed.informer.com application. Feed.informer let’s you melt different feeds together and provides you with the necessary Javascript or PHP codesnippet to include it in your own site.

I’ve tagged a small set of links to ignite the flame of collaboration – feel free to contribute and help to grow the zoo.

UPDATE: With the arrival of steady growing data platforms like data.gov and the like, I decided to stop aggregating external links. With these well structured archives, finding data just got a lot easier.