Data: Making a List of the Top 300 Blogs about Data, Who Did We Miss? by Marshall Kirkpatrick.
From the post:
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.
A bit dated now but instructive for the process of mining and then ranking the blogs. There are any number of subject areas that await similar treatment.
- What subject area would interest you enough to collect the top 100 or 300 blogs?
- Would collecting and ranking be enough to be useful? For what purposes? Where would that fail?
- How would you envision topic maps making a difference for such a collection of blogs?