7 Data Blogs To Explore

Several weeks ago, I posted a question on Quora asking for the best data blogs. There have been 26 replies with dozens of blogs recommended.

Interestingly, when I looked yesterday Quora showed the top blogs that had been recommended by people in the community.

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The answer summary from Quora is as follows:

Blogs mentioned by more than one answer as of Jan 11, 2011:

3 http://blog.smola.org
2 http://blog.data-miners.com
2 http://blog.okcupid.com
2 http://dataspora.com
2 http://flowingdata.com
2 ttp://hunch.net
2 http://www.calculatedriskblog.com

The seven blogs are all of high quality (though if there is one complaint we'd wish some would be updated more often).

Flowing Data: In recent blog posts Flowing Data covers how space junk is being tracked. In another post, the blog cites the "State of Wikipedia," narrated by Jimmy Wales and produced by the talented team at Jesse3.

In all, Flowing Data explores how "designers, statisticians and computer scientists use data to understand who we are by almost entirely relying on data visualization."

OK Cupid: How can you resist a data blog by the people who produce the best dating site... anywhere. This is a big data blog about the dating world. Great stuff:

We've compiled our observations and statistics from hundreds of millions of OkCupid user interactions, all to explore the data side of the online dating world.

OkCupid has 3.5M active members; these articles have had over 1M unique readers since July '09

The detail is exhaustive and revealing, such as the post about the mathematics of beauty.

Smola: An adventure in data land, meant for practitioners who may be turned off by research papers but do want to know the tricks of the trade. Alex Smola describes his blog as a place for those one-page studies that people can explore in 10 minutes. In recent posts he has covered collaborative filtering and how to "compress vectors to reduce memory footprint or to minimize computational cost." Great for data geeks.

Hunch: This is one you don't forget. John Langford writes the blog. He's an academic researcher in machine learning and learning theory who at one point was a Herman Goldstine Fellow at IBM. That's a research fellowship for scientists who study mathematics and computer science. One of its fields of research is in data mining which encompasses a fair degree of machine learning.

Fun read. The blog will direct you to new discoveries such as the Geomblog, which covers computational geometry, algorithms, theoretical computer science and life.

Calculated Risk Blog: I love deep financial journalism. The Calculated Risk Blog covers finance and economics from a data perspective. In this post he looks at the S&P 500 with a graphic that explores comparisons to the market two and four years ago. It can get complex. He quotes Doug Short:

The S&P 500 closed the day down 0.13%. The index is 89.2% above the March 9 2009 closing low, which puts it 18.2% below the nominal all-time high of October 2007.

Data Miners: This is described as a place to read about topics of interest to data miners, ask questions and promote the book authors.

Dataspora: The most recent blog post is August but it's a good one. It explores the seven secrets of data scientists.

There are a number of other blogs mentioned in the Quora discussion It's exciting reading and goes highly recommended. Do you have any recommendations?

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Avril Lavigne Bridget Moynahan Noureen DeWulf Nicollette Sheridan Amber Heard