Stackoverflow Gives Back to the community
This just has be so excited , some time today Jeff from stackoverflow with the help of other users from the site have released a data dump of pretty much all the public data that is available on their site.
For those that are intrested the dump can be located here its a torrent that you will need to download. The download isn’t very big (200mb) but if you download it please do everyone a favor and seed the torrent.
Ok so now onto the cooler things ,here are some of the things that are made available from data extract
- badges
- comments
- posts
- users
- votes
Now alone this data is already pretty awesome but to get the most out of it you need to do a little mining and by mining i mean data mining . Now sadly i am not the best when it comes to data mining i kinda suck a bit so i am going to point you to a very nice post that i found on twitter (soz i cant remember who twitted it). The tutorial basically explains how to do things like extract stats about what the top users post and see what makes them awesome.
Now the final and last idea that i had as a use for the data is to basically make a local only copy of stackoverflow on your pc. Well while this might not sound like a very useful idea the real use of this comes to light when you live in a country like SA. Basically you can never guarantee that you will have a Internet connection so when you need to access stuff like stackoverflow it becomes a bit of a pain.
Basically you can write a basic site that will access the data and allow you to access all of the answers on your PC. The obvious problem with this is that since they dont release the data often (im not sure) you cant keep your local DB updated.
Well there are so many things that you can do with this amount of data. So as always let me know what you think and if you have any different ideas i would like to hear them.
~stalkerh
