Evaluate all web-based information
Relevance: Is it relevant to your topic? Is it current? Is it too detailed or not detailed enough? What are the key concepts?
Authority: Are the authors experts in their fields? Has your lecturer recommeded the book or article? Who is responsible for the page? Is there copyright information or can you contact the person or organisation who created the page? When was the page last updated?
Purpose: What is the purpose of the website? Is it trying to sell? Does it represent a particular point of view? (opinions can be useful but may need to be balanced with other opinions)
Remember you can be anyone on the Internet. The website you are viewing might be written by someone with no qualifications or knowledge!!
Many sites have an overview page called: About This Site or a Site Map. A Site Index can help you find specific information quickly. Look at the domain letters at the end of the URL to identify the type of site.
Timo Elliott’s blog contains information on analytics, big data, and social media. He has been working with SAP Business Objects for 23 years. Keep up-to-date on data analytics software with his blog.
ZDNet’s blog on Big Data by Andrew Brust. Stay current on analytics software, business intelligence, and predictive analytics. ZDNet is a global provider of technology information and trends .
Robert Morton’s twitter feed .Tableau’s senior software engineer. Keep current with Tableau from one of the engineers.
McKinsey Insights & Publication is a knowledge bank from McKinsey & Company, which is a global management consulting firm. Be sure to look at the Functions tab for Business Technology and the Themes tab for Big Data and Advanced Analytics.
Database Trends and Applications focuses on big data. It offers access to webinars, newsletters, white papers, analysis, and more.
SAS stores data and streamlines the data mining process to provide data modeling and perform statistical analysis to allow for better decision making and trend analysis.
R is a statistics programming language used in data analysis and visualizaiton. This is a free and open source programming language that you can download and use for free.
This is a community site for R spondored by Revolution analytics. Come here to get the latest codes, tools, and how to advice for R. This site also provides leads to data sources, which some are free.
This R blog site maintained by Revolution analytics focuses more on news and industry uses with R. The blog's topics are broken down by industry such as finance and life sciences as well as beginner tips and current events.
An Executive White Paper on R by David Smith via Revolution Analytics.
Qlikview works in conjunction with date wharehouses, databases, and spreadsheets such as SAP, Oracle, and Excel. It stores data in memory and is processed on servers. The Qlikview engine allows its users to analyze data and create business intelligent apps for displaying and sharing business intelligence. Qlikview offers a free download of their Personal edition.
Tableau is a business intelligence software that works with data sources and databases. Tableau has a drag and drop interface where you can drag data into the mainframe and the software will configure it into graphs, charts and tables that you can then manipulate and share.
Cognos is an IBM product used in business analytics. It provides a data access strategy for modeling data and designing/authoring reports.
Analytics zone provides a free, personal, non-expiring trial of Cognos Express and Cognos Insight with registration.
The Hubway Trip History here is an easy to access dataset available in CSV format.
Economic Data Series from the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis formatted for R. Select a listed dataset and click Export then download as xsl file.
Agricultural Experiments dataset formatted in R and available on Inside R.
Gapminder Demographic information available in Excel with accompanying visual datagraphic.
Amazon Web Services public data sets that have massive amounts of data in the terabyte range.
Inside R provides a list of over one hundred links that lead to useable datasets from areas such as finance, economics, social sciences and universities most of which are free.
Quora provides large datasets open to the public including links to single datasets.
Digital Analytics Association (DAA) an organization dedicated to exploration of data challenges, exploration and application. Find information on what's happending in the industry, professional development, and events.
Analytics Zone from IBM is an online community for business analytics. Find applications, training, and events for data visualization predictive and social media analytics. You can also download trials and view data visualizaiton examples.
Inside-R A community site for R sponsored by Revolution Analystics. Find How To information on R language, R packages and industry information.
Informs: The Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences. A society to keep informed on business operations and analytics connect with people, communities and build a career.
The Analytics Journey to ROI takes you from the issues to the outcomes and discusses how analytics plays a role in each step. From the Accenture website and viewpoint.
Edware Tufte, data visualization pioneer leads a discussion on the art of data visualization.