If you're looking to build a mashup, you're going to need data. Sometimes this will be your own, other times you'll bring together data from one source and a visualization (such as Virtual Earth) from another.

For people that are looking to try doing mashups with data, one of the recommendations I have is to check out the SuperDataPack from StrikeIron. This is a set of data services that you can get access to for no charge (up to 10,000 hits/month), and there's some great data to use for your mashups.

Today, I posted a new sample in the resources section called 'Personal Government'. This takes a single piece of information - a 5 digit zip code  and then interacts with 5 different services to retrieve information provided by multiple different sources within a common area, government. The sources range from the federal government (senators), state government, county government, and city government. In addition, it also retrieves census data for zipcode as well.

Both a PDF of the lab, as well as a completed solution have been posted.

You may have noticed that my Xbox Gamer Card showed up on the right hand side of the site this week.  I found

<iframe src="http://gamercard.xbox.com/REPLACE-THIS-WITH-YOUR-GAMERTAG.card" scrolling="no" frameBorder="0" height="140" width="204">Put your gamertag here too.</iframe>

If you've got a space in your gamer tag, you'll need to replace the space with %20.

So if you were Major Nelson, yours would look like:

<iframe src="http://gamercard.xbox.com/major%20nelson.card" scrolling="no" frameBorder="0" height="140" width="204">Put your gamertag here too.</iframe>

Official details are here:

http://www.xbox.com/en-US/MyXbox/embedgamercard.htm

And if you're curious how it's possible that I've only got 20 points on my gamer card ...

I actually have another account I've had forever (tallguy), but there was a bit of a mixup when trying to get the account changed over. Net-net, I ended up with two accounts, and can't transfer anything (points, rep, or score) from the original account to this one.  Sounds to me like a good excuse to play alot of  Gears of War when I get home this weekend.

I've added a new lab that showcases how you can use Live QnA in both Windows Forms applications and ASP.NET applications.  Both the lab and the completed version of the lab can be found in the resources section of the site.

Enjoy!