Sometimes when I’m looking into ways to analyze data or I want to play with an analysis tool, chart or technique I need data.
Sometimes I don’t want to use data gathered through my work and sometimes I don’t want to deal with the time suck of scrubbing data.
Here are some sources I’ve found to pull data for exploration:
NationMaster
http://www.nationmaster.com/index.php
Keep drilling about the site and you can get to downloadable files to save data and explore.
U.S. Agriculture site
http://www.fas.usda.gov/fassearch.asp
U.S. Census Bureau
http://www.census.gov/population/www/socdemo/journey.html
U.S. Gov statistics
http://www.usa.gov/Topics/Reference_Shelf/Data.shtml
Browser stats
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#TheCounter.com