After reading a very insightful post a few weeks ago (that I’ve since lost the link to…sorry), I’ve decided to close the comments section on all posts on my blog. Yes, the spam is annoying to deal with, but I’ve had some great experiences over the years meeting people who comment on my posts. I don’t want to miss out on that, so I hope that readers will take the time to send me an e-mail or hit me up on twitter.

I hope that by forcing blog comments to go through by e-mail inbox I will make a more personal connection with those who contact me. But, by far what I see as the biggest potential benefit of moving comments free is that it may encourage more people to start blogging or engaging with others on Twitter. It’s very easy to leave a comment on a blog post and never come back to follow the discussion. Also, when you do leave a comment on someone’s blog, it becomes more about them than about your own work — maybe one reason blog comment sections are a favoured home of internet trolls.

I hope that when potential commenters realize that they cannot leave their mark on a blog post of mine they will do one of two things:

1. Send me their comment in an e-mail and we can discuss. I’ll then update the post with changes and/or additions as necessary
2. Write a blog post, tweet, website, whatever of their own

I’d like to see potential commenters take that moment of insight that a post on this blog inspired and create something new of their own. This is especially important for a number of topics that I write about where there aren’t a million other blogs covering the territory. For example, there are only a handful of Stata focused blogs and it will be a long time before the open data scene suffers from over-coverage.

I hope that this little experiment is positive. If you have any comments on this experiment of mine, please feel free to get in contact with me. Or, write a blog post of your own with your thoughts on why blog comments are good, bad, or ugly.

The move towards more open data, both in government and business, seems to be gaining steam around the world. As a long-time user of the World Development Indicators (WDI), I was impressed when the World Bank (WB) decided to open up their data repository to the world and started the Apps for Development challenge to spur innovation using these datasets.

Although the honour of first prize in the Apps for Development challenge went to StatPlanet, which visualizes WDI data on a global map, I found the second and third prize winners interesting as well. In second prize, the development timelines app allows one to compare historical development statistics through time across countries. Third prize in the challenge was claimed by the Yourtopia app, which allows one to mashup WDI data to show which countries around the world are most like your vision of a utopia.

After this contest, I was absolutely floored when it was announced that Kenya would be taking the plunge into open data with a national data portal. I cannot wait to see the applications of this data in the near future.

I’ve also had the pleasure of being involved in the open data movement in British Columbia (BC) after their highly successful data portal was launched. At a hack-a-thon, where developers, enthusiasts and other citizens gather to work with open data, I was involved in creating the bones of an occupation explorer application that seeks to put data into the hands of high school students as they make education decisions about their future careers. Other great examples of applications created in hackathons at these events in BC include:

• Proactive Disclosure
• My Catch BC
• Municipal Debt Comparitron

With all these examples of open data applications and the rapid economic growth in my home province of Saskatchewan in mind, I hoped to see similar and even greater success here. With a great help and advice from other open data enthusiasts around the country I started an organization called OpenDataSK to promote open data use in Saskatchewan. So far the response has been much greater than I dreamed. I may have been in a little hasty in organizing our first hackathon in the province in order to meet International Open Data day on December 3, 2011, however, even this looks to be promising.

I’ve collected links to several data sources in the province that could be used at the hackathon and now I cannot wait to see what happens with data enthusiasts congregate and creativity starts flowing. If you are in the province, or within reasonable travel time, I encourage you to consider attending. The location is yet to be determined, however, information when it becomes available will be both on the OpenDataSK website and the Eventbrite event page.

Had some very welcome interest in the openfisheries.org project from a PhD student at UC Davis, Carl Boettiger. Due to this interest I’ve pushed out some decent updates to the data API, so now you can download fishery landings data either globally, by country, or by species group in the familiar JSON format. Ever since seeing this graphic using the openfisheries data today, my mind in buzzing with the potential of including more and more fishery data sources in the API to see what others will create.

For the time being, the data API is only available with the use of an API key, to prevent crashes due to unforeseen vulnerabilities in my coding. But, that’s not very open of me, is it? In the next few days I will be shoring up the API coding and lifting the API key requirement so that all can use it. When I do so, I’ll post an update here with links to the API connection info.

A few days ago I completed enough edits to a project I’ve been working on in my spare time to go live with OpenFisheries.org. The site is in early beta, and for now shows a Protovis implementation of what graphics on the site will look like as the dynamic elements are added.

The state of knowledge about global fisheries is really quite poor and worse yet, getting accurate data on anything is an enormous challenge. My hope for the site is to serve as a portal for those interested in fisheries, both large- and small-scale to view a summary of publicly available scientific and economic fisheries data. Additionally, since the graphic summaries are querying a MySQL database of statistics, I will offer an open API for querying and downloading the data as well as embedding graphics in other web pages.

There is a little info about the project on the about page and I hope to have small updates on the blog. For the first time, I chose to host this with Tumblr instead of WordPress, so I’ll see how that goes. There is also a Twitter handle for OpenFisheries.org where I share posts related to open fisheries data.

I’ve written three posts for my blog on Stata in the last month or so. One includes a neat little trick to use regex commands to shorten -if- statements after a command run either interactively or in an do-file. I like this trick because it can be particularly helpful when you are trying to find records in a large or messy (or both! -shudder-) dataset.

Another post is a rundown on getting data from a database dump saved in a .sql file into Stata. I’m a big fan of using a relational database, such as MySQL or PostgreSQL, in conjunction with any analysis in Stata. I hope to have more about working with relational databases in Stata in the future.

Lastly, you may want to checkout a post on recoding observations in a panel dataset. It’s a simple trick I picked up from a discussion on LinkedIn, but helpful nonetheless.

Also, Stata 12 is out now. Unlike with Stata 11, I don’t feel like the improvements in this version will yield more than $500 of value for me so I’m thinking about skipping this upgrade. My only concern is about incompatibility with other Stata users, especially on Statalist, in ways currently unknown to me. I guess we’ll see how it goes…..