Here's a little something I dug up while looking for minable content. There's nothing like info in the public domain to entertain your audience, and give your site that extra substance. This is a link to a public domain question on Google Answers. The respondant did an excellent job, providing links to a wide variety of public domain data. Enjoy
Besides "static" public-domain data, there are numerous sources of timely data that are in the public domain. The U.S. weather service, for example, provides freely available data; the U.S. postal service does too, though there are sometimes conditions with them; and the IMF provides daily currency rates. (I have used two of those resources, weather and IMF data, to make free drop-in toys that can give web pages ever-changing content with no webmaster effort.) There is, of course, nothing that is "free". But this sort of data is something we have all already paid for in one way or another. We ought to be making good use of it.
For those of you into books, and in particular, public domain ebooks that you can use/package as desired free of charge - not to mention a daily feed of new public domain ebooks (do I smell a new toy ?), you can visit Project Gutenberg here
Thanks for sharing the links with us. This info is very useful. I am going to put up some of the content on my sites.
yep, wikipedia is an absolutely wonderful source. absolutely suggest checking it out, although it may not work perfectly for all sites.
Only thing about it though is that it's constantly being changed-so your content won't be static if you use some type of feed. Another downside would be that the information is not verified. However, I still love it.
Another great source of free content is press releases. I use them all the time for news on my sites.