100 Reasons You Should Be Interested in, Want to Share, and Get Excited About Data

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.

1. Be completely transparent to build trust
2. It won’t seem like you’re hiding something
3. Understand impact on the environment
4. Get opinions from other people/experts
5. Increase awareness of neighborhood
6. Truth in numbers
7. Provide better examples to argue a point
8. Wisdom of crowds
9. Pretty pictures
10. Beautiful dynamic data visualization
11. Proof in the data
12. Understanding of the world
13. Understanding of yourself
14. Understanding of your neighborhood
15. Understanding of your city
16. Understanding of your county
17. Understanding of your state
18. Earn the one million dollar Netflix prize
19. Appreciate sports on a different level
20. Data is cool
21. Save money on utilities
22. Data-driven art
23. Overcoming unwarranted biases
24. Avoid jumping to conclusions
25. Understand confusing politics
26. Make educated election votes
27. Enjoy a new way of programming
28. Find and see trends over time
29. Find and see themes over geographical regions
30. Watch changes over space and time
31. Explore relationships between network nodes
32. Know what crime-ridden areas to stay away from
33. Check up on proper news reporting
34. Watchdog on scientific research results
35. Work for a cool newspaper like the New York Times
36. Improve network protocols
37. Optimize traffic flows
38. Minimize the amount you spend on flights
39. Find ideal products based on what you’ve already purchased
40. User-specific book recommendations
41. User-specific movie recommendations
42. Image and vision sciences
44. Statistical computing
45. Produce real research results
46. Find drugs that actually help and don’t harm
47. Deciphering genetic code
48. Cryptography
49. Understand dorky math dramas
50. Spam protection
51. Improve business
52. Earn big money in Black Jack
53. Increase sales
54. Earn more money from advertising
55. Gain an appreciation of numbers
56. Online and public databases
57. Lose weight
58. Gain weight
59. Improve workout routine
60. Industrial engineering
61. Understand government policy
62. Get an ‘A’ in statistics
63. Data visualization is gaining momentum
64. Amount of data is growing constantly
65. Make a more tasty wine
66. Find out the public opinion
67. Save money while surveying the public
68. Win in Yahtzee
69. Game theory
70. Law of Large Numbers
71. Central Limit Theorem
72. Weather forecasting
73. Financial forecasting
74. Know what stocks to invest in
75. Figure out where to put your extra cash
76. Market research
77. Learn to release profitable movies
78. Accountability
79. Accounting
80. See from a different angle
81. Identify the best in a large group
82. Identify the worst in a large group
83. Discover who is cheating on tests
84. Research why crime is on the rise
85. Make your arguments more credible
86. Identify who is making up results
87. Sharing is caring
88. Data from many often provides more than data from one
89. Natural language processing
90. Face identification in a crowd
91. Save the whales
92. Improve computer performance
93. Find cures for diseases
94. Appreciate cool Stamen Design projects
95. Optimize crop growth
96. Compare and contrast profiles
97. Enroll in a great statistics graduate program like UCLA
98. Detect major changes in climate
99. Detect small changes in micro-climates
100. Data is fun

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(Via FlowingData.)