Monday 22 November 2010

Infochimps

Infochimps has been around for a little while now and first came to my attention with its twitter data repository. It seems best described as a "data clearing house" where you can buy and sell data (some of the good stuff is actually free).

In came to my attention again today as the ever interesting Drew Conway (also part of the dataists) released a 0.1 version of an infochimps api wrapper for R. This makes it very easy to get data from infochimps for other uses.

Within the package and api, it's possible to get the geolocation of an ip address (this is by far the best, and by that I mean cheapest that works, tool for doing this), or a whole list of ip addresses for that matter. You can query up to 2000 an hour free of charge (up to 100k a month) - higher rates are possible for various (typically small) amounts of money.

It's also possible to get a twitter user's influence score (the score is calculated by infochimps). Again, the same api usage rates apply.

A visualisation using some infochimps data will follow shortly...

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