If you are not yet familiar with WeoGeo, it’s time to look into what this innovative bunch is doing. In short, they are establishing themselves as the iTunes of geospatial data.

WeoGeo is a place where you go to find, buy and sell GIS datasets. Kind of like the New Jersey Geographic Information Network (NJGIN) for the world. I have been keeping tabs on WeoGeo for a while, so when they launched their most recent feature – an embeddable widget allowing a look into the WeoGeo marketplace from any website – I decided to give it a whirl.

The widget works great, as you can see below. You can browse the WeoGeo marketplace right from my blog’s page, and you can find and purchase geospatial data. I don’t make anything on the sale – no Amazon-style referral program yet. But it must be coming, I’m sure.

An interesting thing caught my eye as I was browsing the WeoGeo catalog. A New Jersey municipal boundaries dataset from Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI (formerly MapInfo)) sells for a whopping $5,800. This is in stark contrast to the freely downloadable NJ municipal boundaries dataset available from NJGIN. For the record, I have not compared the two products – I am only familiar with the free NJGIN dataset – so I don’t know how the PBBI product differs from the free one. But there is a business lesson to be learned there, probably more than one.

The prices on the WeoGeo marketplace are not controlled by WeoGeo – they are set by the sellers. There is clearly money to be made from adding value to products in the public domain and selling the value-added product. There is value in having your dataset listed on a marketplace where a Fortune 100 company might see and buy it. And there might be a buyer out there for that GIS dataset that you just developed. So throw it up on WeoGeo and see what happens.

I don’t take a commission. For now.