Jon Udell has an excellent post about social data analysis on his blog. He has a nice, quick description of some the issues around data, with a tip of the hat to the UN for recently opening its databases to the public.

Better yet, he has a simple concrete suggestion for data collectors: if you encounter a web site with public statistics, tag it as “publicdata” on del.icio.us. He has kindly offered to “curate” the collection under his own list of publicdata bookmarks. We’ll definitely be adding to the collection, and watching the feed for good sources for Many Eyes visualizations!