Dear friends and neighbors, as part of my ongoing practice of using robots and algorithms to make grandiose claims about topics I know too little about, I have enlisted a small army of said implements of journalistic danger to assemble the above collection of blogs about data. I used a variety of methods to build the first half of the list, then scraped all the suggestions from this Quora discussion to flesh out the second half. Want to see if your blog is on this list? Control-F and search for its name or URL and your browser will find it if it’s there.

Why data? Because we live in a time when the amount of data being produced is exploding and it presents incredible opportunities for software developers and data analysts. Opportunities to build new products and services, but also to discover patterns. Those patterns will represent further opportunities for innovation, or they’ll illuminate injustices, or they’ll simply delight us with a greater sense of self-awareness than we had before. (I was honored to have some of my thoughts on data as a platform cited in this recent Slate write-up on the topic, if you’re interested in a broader discussion.) Data is good, and these are the leading people I’ve found online who are blogging about it.

How the Blogs Are Ranked

I then ran these blogs through my favorite web service, Postrank, which looks at every post across every one of these blogs and scores them in terms of social media engagement: comments left, inbound links from other blogs, times that link was shared on Twitter, bookmarked on Delicious and more. Postrank then ranks all the blogs in any collection in terms of the amount of social media engagement they have received in recent history. That’s where this ranking came from. Nothing but which sites get included is under my control – so I think I can be objectively proud that my co-workers at ReadWriteCloud have come in at #3. Note that you might find a blog or two here where Postrank’s analysis of its feed needs a reset, because it’s hit an error and returned blank results. That’s what happened with the primary O’Reilly feed about data, and I’ve emailed Postrank to ask them to reset their scoring machine for it. That’s especially in need of remedy given that O’Reilly is working hard on a forthcoming conference all about data called Strata. (I’ll be there, moderating a panel on data-driven journalism.)

After I ran these through Postrank, I pulled down the data the way I wanted it using Needlebase, then put it in this Google Spreadsheet and embedded it here.

I did the same thing with 300 blogs about geotechnology last week – and just like I did then, I’ll ask now: who did we miss? I’d love to get these leader boards built out for several of the top topics ReadWriteWeb covers and turn them into weekly posts, covering the leading and ascendent voices in niche blogospheres covering topics that will change the future of the web and world.

I imagine that Data Blogs may be a bigger world than Geo Blogs, so I may have missed more this time. Let me know in comments if you’d like your blog included in the index and I’ll add it. Or if you know others that ought to be included. Fun times – and thanks for continuing to blog, folks, in this era of 140 character utterances!

Data analysis and business intelligence analyst Merv Adrian announced on his blog today that he’s going to giant analyst firm Gartner and his discussion of the decision is really interesting. He just spent the last two years independent, is very active in social media and will now join a much more traditional organization.  He’s on Twitter at @merv.

It was just two months ago that Michael Krigsman welcomed Adrian into the Enterprise Irregulars working group.  Other members of the group work in big firms as well.

Adrian credits boutique analyst firm RedMonk with inspiring many of his strategic beliefs about how analysts can participate in social media and offered a good critique of standard practices in response to a James Governor blog post discussing Gartner’s social media last Spring.

As for participation by the old guard, they have a way to go. Just today I heard of an analyst being called out for putting “too much good stuff” in his/her blog. The notion that it might be a way to draw eyeballs to the for-pay content is still beyond all of them. And with rare (though exemplary) exceptions, twitter is for broadcast, not for dialogue; even if they tolerate some limited interaction with those outside the paywall, it’s probably that they aren’t noticing it. They are most definitely not encouraging or motivating it.

That should give you a little taste of what Merv Adrian will try to bring to the biggest analyst firm in technology, and a firm that is widely considered behind the times when it comes to social media.  (Though neither Governor nor Adrian agree with that sentiment.) I haven’t listened to the Sage Circle podcast linked-to at the end of his announcement post yet, but I’m sure that will be good too.

Adrian describes himself as: Technology analyst and consultant, 30 years of industry experience, covering software mostly, hardware sometimes. Former Forrester SVP.

I don’t know Adrian, though I have been following him since putting up this post on ReadWriteWeb about how to follow hundreds of analysts on Twitter with a single click.  Anyone who gets props from James Governor, Carter Lusher and says the kinds of things it looks like Adrian does has got my interest piqued, though.  Good luck in the new gig Merv, and keep blogging.

via Going to Gartner « Merv Adrian’s IT Market Strategy.

This post is the beginning of an experiment wherein I put up quick bits about found links that are too long for Twitter but not quite the right fit to post on ReadWriteWeb.

I wrote a blog post on ReadWriteWeb this afternoon about AOL’s acquisition of TechCrunch. As the first hired writer at TC years ago, I’ve got some very personal thoughts and feelings about it. I thought you, readers of MarshallK.com, might want to read them.

I wrote about a really cool new feature on Foursquare today, called it “must-have,” and now am seeing a fair amount of cynical backlash. People get upset when you get excited about Foursquare – they think it’s overhyped, they want to see less coverage of it, less effusive coverage of it, more critical coverage, more discretion over what we tech bloggers get breathlessly excited about so that they the readers needn’t be bothered by anything but the rare, guaranteed win that they must pay attention to.

Well that’s not how it works, folks. We get excited, I get excited, about potential. About early startups that are opening our eyes to new possibilities for utility and value creation. I don’t know which ones will work out long-term and I don’t really care. When I write about technologies, I write about what they do for me and what I like about them.

Note that one commenter below makes a good counter-argument.
Continue reading →

Government data as a platform for innovation is something I find exciting. Unfortunately, every time we write about it at ReadWriteWeb, very few people read our articles. Consumer data from private companies, be it Facebook, Twitter or Foursquare, for example, finds far more interested readers.

Both have a few things in common: they are stories about data that you and I produce being leveraged by independent developers to build new services and ways to make use of that data. I love EveryBlock and the way it shows me the 911 calls, restaurant reviews and news stories about the area I live in. It uses mostly government data. I really liked the story I wrote about it (“The Day Everyblock Came to Town“) but it got far fewer pageviews than the equally local story Boom! Tweets & Maps Swarm to Pinpoint a Mysterious Explosion.

Maybe that’s because it was about an explosion, and maybe because it indicated some fulfillment of the promise of data exploited. But I think it’s in part because it’s about Twitter data instead of about public data in the traditional sense of the word. Readers just don’t find government data very interesting. It’s a part of a larger problem I think: people don’t care about nonprofit or social good stories either. Far, far fewer people read stories about human rights, watchdog organizations, etc. than they do the big corporate market leaders online. We cover social good stuff anyway, because it’s important, but we always recognize that those stories are going to perform poorly in terms of readership.

Thoughts?

Nate Silver, author of the political stats blog FiveThirtyEight, is now writing for the New York Times. That’s very cool. It’s an inspiration to try and write better blog posts and fewer mediocre ones. ReadWriteWeb is syndicated by the NYT, but that’s different. You’ve got to be pretty consistently awesome, I’m guessing, for the Times to say “hey, come put your blog on our site.” That level of consistent awesomeness is an inspiration, for any blogger, anywhere. I feel a long, long way from so consistently awesome right now. I’d sure love to grow as an author to feel like I wrote fewer mediocre blog posts than I do today.

One step I’d like to take is to learn to stop before publishing and ask myself: how could this post be better in a big way? What fundamental insight can my noggin’ churn up with just five more minutes of slowing down from the perpetual mad dash of blogging? Publishing immediately is hard wired in my brain now, though, and it’s going to be easier said than done to change that habit.