The present and future of the R blogosphere (~7 minute video from useR2011)

This is (roughly) the lightning talk I gave in useR2011. If you are a reader of R-bloggers.com then this talk is not likely to tell you anything new. However, if you have a friend, college or student who is a new useRs of R, this talk will offer him a decent introduction to what the R […]

This is (roughly) the lightning talk I gave in useR2011. If you are a reader of R-bloggers.com then this talk is not likely to tell you anything new. However, if you have a friend, college or student who is a new useRs of R, this talk will offer him a decent introduction to what the R blogosphere is all about.

The talk is a call for people of the R community to participate more in reading, writing and interacting with blogs.

I was encouraged to record this talk per the request of Chel Hee Lee, so it may be used in the recent useR conference in Korea (2011)

The talk (briefly) goes through:

  1. The widespread influence of the R blogosphere
  2. What R bloggers write about
  3. How to encourage a blogger you enjoy reading to keep writing
  4. How to start your own R blog (just go to wordpress.com)
  5. Basic tips about writing a blog
  6. One advice about marketing your R blog (add it to R-bloggers.com)
  7. And two thoughts about the future of R blogging (more bloggers and readers, and more interactive online visualization)

My apologies for any of the glitches in my English. For more talks about R, you can visit the R user groups blog. I hope more speakers from useR 2011 will consider uploading their talks online.

A competition to recommend "relevant" R packages – and the future of R

Update: the competition was just launched.
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What is the competition about?

Drew Conway and John Myles Whyte have collected data from (52) R users about the packages they have installed. The data is now available on github for download and the contest will be run on the kaggle platform.

For more details, head over to dataists.

And for fun, here is the dependency graph for R packages they have assembled so far:

A graphical visualization of packages’ “suggestion” relationships. Affectionately referred to as the R Flying Spaghetti Monster. More info below.

A tiny bit more on R bloggers virality

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