What are some ways to have fun with a large amount of data? (ie, the Twitter, del.icio.us etc. APIs) [closed]

Question

Twitter, Google, Amazon, del.icio.us etc. all give you a lot of data to play with, all for free. There's also a lot of textual data available through initiatives like Project Gutenberg. And that, it seems, is just the tip of the iceberg.

I have been wondering how you could use this data for fun. I'm a first year IT student, so I have no knowledge of statistics, machine learning, collaborative filtering etc. My interest in this area was piqued by the book Programming Collective Intelligence by Toby Segaran, and now I want to take a deeper look at what you can do with data. I don't know where to start. Any ideas?

I have also been pondering whether I should go and buy something like Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming. Is it worth the trip across the city?