Where data comes from Data is everywhere: your government, your web server, your business partners, even your body. While we aren't drowning in a sea of data, we're finding that almost everything can (or has) been instrumented. At O'Reilly, we frequently combine publishing industry data from Nielsen BookScan with our own sales data, publicly available Amazon data, and even job data to see what's hap- pening in the publishing industry. Sites like Infochimps and Factual provide access to many large datasets, including climate data, MySpace activity streams, and game logs from sporting events. Factual enlists users to update and improve its datasets, which cover topics as diverse as endocrinologists to hiking trails. 1956 disk drive