Data.gov is one of my favorite new Open Government initiatives from the Obama administration. Still in it's infancy, data.gov offers an impressive array of federal datasets for download to programmers, researchers, statisticians and journalists, as well as some handy ready-to-use widgets for easy data visualization for those who don't want to play with the data themselves.
Data is available for download in XML, CSV/text, KML/KMZ and ESRI formats. Here's the tutorial for how to use the site.
I added an national environmental public health tracking widget to the bottom of this page for demonstration purposes.
More public datasets, some from the federal government and some from private entities, are becoming increasingly available as semantic web markup and data mashing enters the mainstream. Here are a few more sources for public data:
Amazon Web Services, including an English-language Wikipedia extraction and Freebase data dump
The University of Virginia Library's Historical Census data
Datamob has lots of fun datasets, including links to historical NYC ridership data and the Federal Reserve Economic Data API, in case you want to crunch your own.
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