CustomerCentrix

What are interesting, freely available sources of information and topics of discussion that could be foundations upon an online community? How about:

• Census - pretty dry, but possibly good source of geographic info and demographics
• Maps - APIs from Yahoo, Google, etc come to mind
• Satellite - goes with maps, but interesting stuff recently available from Google or MSN Earth
• Weather - lots of sources, possibly historical data and almanac
• News - local as possible, maybe headlines from weekly or free papers - might be possibly to scrape headlines from these (not sure about legal/copyright) - best sources are probably blogs or personal contributions
• Classifieds - like Craigs list, but more localized, smaller geographically, so a garage sale is shown by zip
• Schools - all levels, automatic PTA support and parent stuff
• Sports - from University/Pro down to little league and preschool soccer, easy entry for schedules, scores, pictures (next) of the locals stuff along with rss feeds from larger news services for major teams - be rather ego boosting to see your kid's soccer games score (that you or the coach posted) along with a headline of the nearby Big 10 or pro game results
• Pictures - maybe promise an automatic pull if a user tags a picture with a zip code
• Feeds from del.icio.us, flickr, technorati and other pop culture stuff.
• Emergency info - hospitals, clinics, vet
• Yellow pages, white pages (or links to them)
• Welcome to the neighborhood info - Chamber of Commerce, Tourism info

Key for all of this is presentation. There needs to be unique ways organizing all of this so that it looks professional but has a feel that is local and "small town". Like a little newspaper without all of the misspellings ;-)

Maybe have some nice ways of rotating content to keep it fresh even for someone who looks at it several times a day.