Remember blogrolls? Those lists of other blogs to check out that were all the rage around 2003 or so. Anyway, here is a list of blogs and podcasts I consider worth your time.
I’m only including blogs here that are reasonably active. There are some interesting niche blogs that never get updated. They can be interesting, but I just don’t see the point of watering down this list with lots of those.
Blogs
- Alberto Cairo’s The Functional Art blog. Alberto writes from the data journalism perspective and has a good mix of interesting thoughts, reviews, and the occasional piece of scathing criticism.
- Andy Kirk’s VisualisingData. Andy is holding up the British flag here with his spelling. He has interesting postings on lots of topics, and very worthwhile monthly, six-monthly, and yearly round-ups of the best stuff from around the web.
- The University of Washington’s Interactive Data Lab has a blog where they write about their research. It’s not the most active blog in the world, but the postings are definitely worthwhile
- Kaiser Fung’s Junk Charts. Kaiser is a statistician with a good perspective on data analysis and visualization. He writes short, concise critiques and has interesting thoughts to share.
- Cole Nussbaumer’s Storytelling with Data. Cole has a good approach to visual communication, using simple and effective visual design ideas. Her talk videos are also worth watching.
- Nathan Yau’s FlowingData. Nathan posts links to a lot of different projects, all centered around design. He has also started building his own projects, which are quite nice, and has good articles to get you started in visualization using R, d3, etc.
- Enrico Bertini’s Fell In Love With Data. Enrico is a professor at NYU and writes the occasional blog posting. The postings are as interesting as they are infrequent though, so definitely worth following.
- WTFViz. The place to go for tons of fun bad examples.
It’s a good idea to use a newsreader to follow the sites below. Feedly is what I use, and it can be used on its own or with a separate reader app like Reeder.
I have also turned the list above plus the podcasts below into a shared Feedly collection for your convenience.
Podcasts
- Data Stories. Moritz Stefaner and Enrico Bertini talk to a wide variety of practitioners and academics in visualization.
- PolicyViz. Jon Schwabish runs the show here, talking to many interesting people. His episodes tend to be a bit more tightly edited and shorter than Data Stories.
- Tableau Wannabe. A podcast focused on Tableau, but also covering a wide range of different topics. No idea why it’s called wannabe.
- 99% Invisible. Admittedly not a visualization podcast, but it touches on many fascinating topics. And it’s just such an amazing podcast. Absolutely worth checking out.