When I talk about data, people often zone out or don’t really see the interest. Why does this happen? People just don’t understand the wonder that is data and how much of their life is led by data. With that in mind, why would people share their data? You can’t share something you don’t know exists. Off the top of my head, here’s 100 reasons to be interested in, want to share, and get excited about data.
- Be completely transparent to build trust
- It won’t seem like you’re hiding something
- Understand impact on the environment
- Get opinions from other people/experts
- Increase awareness of neighborhood
- Truth in numbers
- Provide better examples to argue a point
- Wisdom of crowds
- Pretty pictures
- Beautiful dynamic data visualization
- Proof in the data
- Understanding of the world
- Understanding of yourself
- Understanding of your neighborhood
- Understanding of your city
- Understanding of your county
- Understanding of your state
- Earn the one million dollar Netflix prize
- Appreciate sports on a different level
- Data is cool
- Save money on utilities
- Data-driven art
- Overcoming unwarranted biases
- Avoid jumping to conclusions
- Understand confusing politics
- Make educated election votes
- Enjoy a new way of programming
- Find and see trends over time
- Find and see themes over geographical regions
- Watch changes over space and time
- Explore relationships between network nodes
- Know what crime-ridden areas to stay away from
- Check up on proper news reporting
- Watchdog on scientific research results
- Work for a cool newspaper like the New York Times
- Improve network protocols
- Optimize traffic flows
- Minimize the amount you spend on flights
- Find ideal products based on what you’ve already purchased
- User-specific book recommendations
- User-specific movie recommendations
- Image and vision sciences
- Statistical computing
- Produce real research results
- Find drugs that actually help and don’t harm
- Deciphering genetic code
- Cryptography
- Understand dorky math dramas
- Spam protection
- Improve business
- Earn big money in Black Jack
- Increase sales
- Earn more money from advertising
- Gain an appreciation of numbers
- Online and public databases
- Lose weight
- Gain weight
- Improve workout routine
- Industrial engineering
- Understand government policy
- Get an ‘A’ in statistics
- Data visualization is gaining momentum
- Amount of data is growing constantly
- Make a more tasty wine
- Find out the public opinion
- Save money while surveying the public
- Win in Yahtzee
- Game theory
- Law of Large Numbers
- Central Limit Theorem
- Weather forecasting
- Financial forecasting
- Know what stocks to invest in
- Figure out where to put your extra cash
- Market research
- Learn to release profitable movies
- Accountability
- Accounting
- See from a different angle
- Identify the best in a large group
- Identify the worst in a large group
- Discover who is cheating on tests
- Research why crime is on the rise
- Make your arguments more credible
- Identify who is making up results
- Sharing is caring
- Data from many often provides more than data from one
- Natural language processing
- Face identification in a crowd
- Save the whales
- Improve computer performance
- Find cures for diseases
- Appreciate cool Stamen Design projects
- Optimize crop growth
- Compare and contrast profiles
- Enroll in a great statistics graduate program like UCLA
- Detect major changes in climate
- Detect small changes in micro-climates
- Data is fun
What did I miss?
101. Make sense of lists
103. Find missing data
1054. Find outliers
1055. Decide what to do with them
pi. Understand the limits
-1. Impose limits
0. achieve nirvana
@Jorge: hehe. love it.