Creating unique link bait with public data

People love data and there's plenty available for free online - ready to be tortured and presented in visual graphs. Popular examples are XKCD's radiation chart, a map over the U.S. with states replaced by foreign countries with similar GDP, trend lines for baby names and visualization over how americans die. It doesn't even have to be data available for download since you can scrape it yourself if it's available online.

This might be a longshot but I'd love to see people share data sources and maybe great link baits.

- https://www.google.com/trends/ (see how popularity changes)
- https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/
- http://data.worldbank.org/
- http://www.nationmaster.com/au
- http://www.data.gov/

I'd love to know more about the types of information you might scrape from these lists. Examples of what others have done historically is somewhat helpful, but if others are like myself - it's lacking the creativity to find unique data to use and unique ways to present it - that makes it hard to create linkbait.

Some more data sources:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/data-sources/http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/index.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/opendata
Interesting Sites
http://flowingdata.com/http://www.visualcomplexity.com/vc/Hopefully, this inspires someone.

Here's another showing trends for both deaths and births: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/122529/database-dead

I am very grateful to you for such a beneficial information. I was joined this forum only for constructive and productive stuff and finally, in the form of your post , I am getting my goal.