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A friend of mine shared his strategy with me: find some big uninteresting data set from the government or whatever, figure out some way to make it interesting f
by evan_ 8y ago
A friend of mine shared his strategy with me: find some big uninteresting data set from the government or whatever, figure out some way to make it interesting for regular people, and build a nice interface to it.
For instance, turning old real estate and immigration records into an ancestry site.
Monetizing it is still an issue...
- newman8r 8y agoThat's similar to Matthew Lesko's strategy (AKA question mark guy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lesko https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Lesko) Many of his books consisted of freely available government publications.
- akudha 8y agoThis reminds me of city-data.com It is an ugly looking site, the forums are full of nasty comments, but it is still useful at some level I guess. They claim to get millions of page views. Not sure how much money they make, but they have been around for more than a decade
- Odenwaelder 8y agohttps://www.northdata.de/ https://www.northdata.de/ Did something like that: Crawl public registries for companies, parse changes to them and build a graph out of it. Very cool!
- megaman8 8y agoThere's a lot of stuff in this space that hasn't been done yet, but that's for a very good reason. First of all, it doesn't pass the toothbrush test: it's the type of thing that's super valuable the first time you visit but you don't really need to come back to it over and over. Second big problem: SEO. Search engines like long form written content, they don't know how to value tools that slice and dice data: they simply don't see any value in it and you'll never get SEO from it.