A year ago (on December 9th 2009), I wrote about founding R-bloggers.com, an (unofficial) online R journal written by bloggers who agreed to contribute their R articles to the site.

In this post I wish to celebrate R-bloggers’ first birthday by sharing with you:

1. Links to the top 14 posts of 2010
2. Reflections about the origin of R-bloggers
3. Statistics on “how well” R-bloggers did this year
4. Links to other related projects
5. An invitation for sponsors/supporters to help keep the site alive

1. Top 14 R posts of 2010

R-bloggers’ success is largely owed to the content submitted by the R bloggers themselves.  The R community currently has 143 active R bloggers (links to the blogs are clearly visible in the right navigation bar on the R-bloggers homepage).  In a little over one year, these bloggers wrote almost 3,000 posts about R.  That is amazing!

Here is a list of the top visited posts on the site in 2010:

• 100 Prisoners, 100 lines of code
• Google AI Challenge: Languages Used by the Best Programmers
• Getting Started with Sweave: R, LaTeX, Eclipse, StatET, & TeXlipse
• Why Use R?
• “simply start over and build something better”
• R Tutorial Series: R Beginner’s Guide and R Bloggers Updates
• Select operations on R data frames
• Hacker News User Base Changed?
• Top 10 Algorithms in Data Mining
• Fantasy football (oops, soccer)
• Delete rows from R data frame
• Visualizing Facebook Friends: Eye Candy in R
• Advanced graphics in R
• How to build a world-beating predictive model using R

2. Motivation for creating R-bloggers

Originally, the idea for R-bloggers came when, over a year ago, I spent several hours trying to find bloggers who wrote about R.  I was successful in finding roughly 14 R bloggers (and too many blog posts of people talking about pirates).  This experience led me to wonder how many other people like myself were also struggling to find these bloggers.  The second thought I had was the answer to the following question: “What can I offer an R blogger so that he will tell me that he exists?”  The answer I came up with is “audience and traffic” – and that’s what R-bloggers tries to achieve: the site offers the blogger audience and traffic in exchange for the blogger giving permission to republish their “R content” on the site.

Part of my motivation was that, as one of these bloggers who wrote about R (here, on R-statistics.com), I too hoped to gain more audience and traffic for my content.   R-bloggers helped me achieve this goal.

3. Statistics – how well did R-bloggers do this year

There are several matrices one can consider when evaluating the success of a website.  I’ll present a few of them here and will begin by talking about the visitors to the site.

This year, the site was visited by about 286,000 “Absolute Unique Visitors.”  There was a total of nearly 600,000 visits and over 1 million page-views.  People have surfed the site from over 200 countries, with the greatest number of visitors coming from the United States (40%) and then followed by the United Kingdom (6.8%), Germany (6.6%), Canada (4.9%), France (3.3%), and other countries.

The site has received between 15,000 to 25,000 visits a week in the past few months, and I suspect this number will remain stable in the next few months (unless something very interesting will happen).

I believe this number will stay constant thanks to visitors’ loyalty: 60% of the site’s visits came from returning users.

Another indicator of reader loyalty is the number of subscribers to R-bloggers as counted by feedburner, which includes both RSS readers and e-mail subscribers.  The range of subscribers is estimated to be between 2600 to 2900.

Thus it seems that R-bloggers succeeds in offering a real service to the R users community.

4. Projects related to R-bloggers

During the last year I have created several R-bloggers clone sites in the hopes of serving other audiences.  I started a multilingual version of R-bloggers at www.r-bloggers.com/lang/ (currently hosting 7 bloggers, written in Dutch, Indonesian, Italian, Korean, Russian, Spanish).  I hope more will join the site in the future.

I’ve also started 3 other promising such sites: SAS-x.com, DanceBloggers.com and forex-bloggers.com.  How will they do?  Only time will tell.

5. Invitation to sponsor/advertise on R-bloggers

Due to the increase in the site’s popularity, 4 months ago I had to upgrade R-bloggers’ hosting account to a VPS hosting, which had directed me to decide on attempting to add ads to R-bloggers so to keep the site self sufficient financially.

So in the hopes of keeping the site sustainable in the long run, I am now (somewhat forced) to make this call: if you are interested in sponsoring/placing ads/supporting R-bloggers, then you’re welcome to contact me.

Happy new year!
Yours,
Tal Galili

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 tiny bit more on R bloggers virality

Since I started getting involved in the R bloggers community, I can recall two major discussion that have attracted more then two bloggers writing about them.

The first one was people in the R community arguing against Dr. AnnMaria De Mars post “The Next Big Thing”, where she wrote that “R is an epic fail.” (my response to it then was the post ““The next big thing”, R, and Statistics in the cloud“)
The second one was tackling the question “Is R “that bad” that it should be rewritten from scratch?”. Many responses went to the post by Ross Ihaka who was arguing for the need to rewrite R from scratch (a very wide spectrum of replies to that can be viewed on the stackoverflow discussion I started on the topic.)

And in the past few days I noticed a starting of a cascade of posts, all promoting the post at “dataists“.

This leads me to three simple statements:
1) I think it is beautiful that the R community has advocates that defend R’s role in the future of statistics
2) I think it is important that the R community has so many (smart) people (beyond the amazing R core team) who reflects on how R is doing, and of the challenges that the R language and environment will face in the future.
3) I think it is a fascinating thing that the R community is a community of researchers who have the skills to research themselves. Each community of a discipline can use it’s skill on itself – psychologists may psychoanalyze themselves, WordPress bloggers may write about WordPress, and R users can plan studies and analyse data about themselves – this potential is only beginning to be untapped – and I am excited to see where it might lead in the years to come.

This post can be summed up by one two sentences: “We can’t buy love.” “Starting to pay for love could make it disappear” while at the same time “We need money to live and love”. These two conflicting forces, with relation to open source, are the topic of this post.

This post is directed to the community of R users but is relevant to people of all open source projects. It deals with the question of open source projects and funding. Specifically, should a community of open source developers and users, once it exists, want to start raising/donating money to the main code contributers?

The conflict arises when, on the one side, we intuitively wish to repay the people who have helped us but worry of the implications of behavioral studies that suggests that doing so might destroy the motivation of the developers to continue working without contently getting payed, and that making the shift from doing something for one reason (whatever it is) to doing it for money, might not easily be turned back.
On the other side, developers needs to make a (good) living, and we (as a community) should strive for them to be well payed.
How can these two be reconciled?

This article won’t offer a decisive conclusions – and my hope is to invite discussion on the matter (from both amatures and professionals in the field of open source and behavioral economics) so to give more ideas for people to base their opinions on.

Update: this post was substantially updated from it’s original version, thanks to responses both in the comments, and especially in the e-mails. I apologies for writing a post that had needed so many corrections, and at the same time I am grateful for all the people who took the time to shed light in places where I was wrong.

* * * *

Motivation: R has issues – how do we get them fixed?

In the past two weeks there has been a raging debate regarding the future of R (hint: “what is R“). Without going deeper into the topic (I already wrote about it here, where you too can go and respond), I’ll sum up the issue with a quote from Ross Ihaka (one of the two founders of R) who recently wrote:

I’ve been worried for some time that R isn’t going to provide the base that we’re going to need for statistical computation in the future. (It may well be that the future is already upon us.) There are certainly efficiency problems (speed and memory use), but there are more fundamental issues too. Some of these were inherited from S and some are peculiar to R.

After this, several discussion threads where started around the web (for example: 0, 1, 2, 3, 4 ,5, 6 ), but then a comment was made in the R-help mailing list by Jaroslaw Piskorski who wrote:

A few days ago Tal Galili posted a message about some controversies concerning the future of R. Having read the discussions, especially those following Ross Ihaka’s post, I have come to the conclusion, that, as usual, the problem is money. I doubt there would be discussions about dropping R in its present form if the R-Foundation were properly funded and could hire computer scientists, programmers and statisticians. If a commercial company is able to provide big-database and multicore solutions, then so would a properly founded R-Foundation.

To which my response is that: I strongly disagree with this statement..
That is, I do agree that money could help with things. It could be that money could be a part of the solution. But I doubt that the core of this problem is money. Nor that it would be solved if we could only now hire “computer scientists, programmers and statisticians” (although that could be part of the solution).

And the reason I am doubtful stems from two sources:

1. Motivation in general – and money

The first reason is presented in the following short (~10 minutes) video titled “Drive: The surprising truth about what motivates us”, adapted from Dan Pink’s talk at the RSA.
This talk dicusses what motivates us, and also about what (surprisingly) doesn’t motivate us: money. What does? watch the talk (it’s fun):

2. The split personality of open-source developers: Social Norms vs Market Norms

The second concern I have comes after reading Dan Ariely’s great book “Predictably Irrational”. In chapter 4, Ariely makes the distinction between (what he terms) “Social Norms” and “Market Norms”. You can listen to him talk about it in the following (~4 minutes) video:

Another example of what is said in this video is an experiment Dan made where he took three groups for a 5-minute task on a computer, dragging circles into a square. One group did it as a favor to the experimenter, one group was paid $5 and the third group was paid 50 cents. The 50-cent group was less productive than the $5 group. But the people who did the task as a favor were the most productive of all! In case this artificial experiment is not convincing, Dan also gave real-life examples, including military service and the pro bono work of lawyers.

In our case, we can often teach R in the University or use it to solve real world problems while getting paid (and being expected to be paid), but at the same time we ask and give help (answering questions and programming) online (and offline with friends) for free. We are walking a thin line of keeping a psychological balance here. Ariely wrote that:

When a social norm collides with a market norm, the social norm goes away for a long time. In other words, social relationships are not easy to reestablish.

And as Stormy Peters (executive director of the GNOME Foundation) wrote:

One of the things about the open source community that continues to baffle those non-open source people is, “why do you do it?” Open source developers work on open source software for a number of reasons from scratching an itch to gaining a reputation to building a resume to contributing to a good cause.

The interesting problem comes when money enters into the equation. Research shows that when someone works on something for free (for internal rewards) if you start paying them you replace those internal rewards. Then if you stop paying them, they will stop working on it. Does that hold true for open source software? Are commercial companies killing open source by paying people to work on it?

Or said differently (and elsewhere):

Once you are paid to work on open source software, it would be hard to go back to doing it for free.

Hence my question (and fear): Would starting to pay people in the R community (who by now where working for free) to work on R (a free open source project) – will end up killing it?

So can we pay open source developers?

Let’s be clear here – we can pay open source developers, but this includes the risk of later loosing them from the community. Would this always be the case – I don’t know (hence the room for discussion at the end of the post).

The answer: Love
One thing I do believe we should do is to be grateful: Send developers kind e-mails, buy their books, link to their blogs/home-pages – show them we love their work. Why am I using the “L” word? Because open source is (as Clay Shirky convinced me in his ~9 minutes video) is about Love:

And in the context of R:
The quality of R would not have been made possible even if all the people who have worked for it where to pay the developers from day 1. I am saying this again: If we where forced to pay to have R developed for us, it would have been more expansive then we could have been able to ever afford (under market norms). Since some of the best statisticians in the world (please correct me if I am wrong), have spent countless hours (days/months/years) to make this software work and support it’s user base, can you imagine how much money that would have cost?

So is money evil for open source?

Answer (IMHO): no!

Money, like a knife, is a tool – not good nor evil.

On the one hand, switching from community appreciation to rewarding with money might turn out to be a dangerous path for the future of R.

At the same time I believe (and I am willing to be proven wrong) that we SHOULD get money collected to our community, and that we should use it to pay people outside our community: graphic designers, UI people, CS students (who are not very deep into the R world), grants for young students and maybe even paying the R developers core team. My current rule of thumb will be that money should be used only mostly to get skills that are outside of our current community base.

Learning from the experience of other FOSS projects

The questions this post reflects upon are relatively new to us (e.g: how to scale up social relationships in collaboration projects). One of our best sources for solutions is probably the experience of other open source projects. While history may not predict our future, it can still give us ideas and even inspire us of what can be done.

I hope to link here to posts on the topic, if you have any, please link to them in the comments.

(Originally I wrote about WordPress, but after getting responses from some friends closer to the core team – I decided to remove that section so to not misinform people)

I’ll conclude

I don’t think R developers should be paid. (this is not exact and I erased this sentence)
I believe money should be collected by the community for the community.
Paying R developers is tricky, I don’t know how it can be done in a healthy and stable way (although I believe it can be done).
A good strategy for spending community’s money could be to pay for services that are outside our community knowledge/skill base.

Your opinions are welcomed.

In this post I reflect on the current state of the R blogosphere, and share my hopes for it’s future.

* * *

Background

I am very grateful to Dr. AnnMaria De Mars for writing her post “The Next Big Thing”.
In her post, Dr. De Mars attacked R by accusing it of being “an epic fail” (in being user-friendly) and “NOT the next big thing”. Of course one should look at Dr. De Mars claims in their context. She is talking about particular aspects in which R fails (the lacking of a mature GUI for non-statisticians), and had her own (very legitimate) take on where to look for “the next big thing”. All in all, her post was decent, and worth contemplating upon respectfully (even if one, me for example, doesn’t agree with all of Dr. De Mars claims.)

R bloggers are becoming a community

But Dr. De Mars post is (very) important for a different reason. Not because her claims are true or false, but because her writing angered people who love and care for R (whether legitimately or not, it doesn’t matter). Anger, being a very powerful emotion, can reveal interesting things. In our case, it just showed that R bloggers are connected to each other.

So far there are 69 R bloggers who wrote in reply to Dr. De Mars post (some more kind then others), they are:

• The inevitable R backlash by Matt Blackwell.
• R is an Epic Fail? by Yihui Xie
• The Next Big Thing: SAS and SPSS!…wait, what? By Drew Conway (Extra hat tip for also linking to other R bloggers who wrote about this)
• R Is (Not) the Next Big Thing by Joe Dunn
• A reply in Spanish
• “The next big thing”, R, and Statistics in the cloud by Tal Galili (me)
• R Command Line by Lee
• R is an epic fail or is it just overhyped by Ajay Ohri
• Statisticians and programming; languages and GUIs by Mike Smith

This is good news, since it shows that R has a community of people (not “just people”) who write about it.
In one of the posts, someone commented about how R current stage reminds him of how linux was in 1998, and how he believes R will grow to be amazingly dominant in the next 10 years.
In the same way, I feel the R blogosphere is just now starting to “wake up” and become aware that it exists. Already 6 bloggers found they can write not just about R code, but also reply to does who “attack” R (in their view). Imagine how the R blogosphere might look in a few years from now…

I would like to end with a more general note about the importance of R bloggers collaboration to the R ecosystem.

How to start a movement

In his wonderful (3 minutes) TED talk, Derek Sivers talks about “how to start a movement”:

One of his most interesting conclusions (in my opinion) is that a movement is not just thanks to it’s leader, but also (if not more) thanks to it’s first followers – the one who make the first guy a leader.

The implication of that is that if you are a bloggers, and you find someones work (articles) worth while – “follow them”. Write about it (in twitter/facebook or your own blog), support that blogger by commenting. Doing that will only strengthen the impact of the thing you care about.

I think and believe that Bloggers collaboration is synergistic.
Bloggers who cross link to each other gain more respect (and thus, traffic and influence) from both search engines (e.g: google) and the traditional media.
Bloggers coming together, supporting each other with their words, can sometimes make a “news story” suddenly important for the media to report.
I hope as time will progress, we will have a more interconnected R blogosphere. One that will enable the R community to reach a wider circle of people and influence (in the public and private sector).

In conclusions the case of the bloggers reply to Dr. De Mars article is (I believe) a sign to whats coming a head – and I feel very optimistic about it

I already wrote about R-bloggers on the R mailing list, so it only seems fitting to write about it more here. I will explain what R-bloggers is and then move to explain what I hope it will accomplish.

R-Bloggers.com is a central hub of content collected from bloggers who write about R (in English) and if you are an R blogger you can join it by filling in this form.

I built the site with the aspiration to  help R bloggers and users to connect and follow the “R blogosphere”. When I am writing these words, R-bloggers already has 17 blogs in it, and I hope for many (many) more.

How does R-Bloggers operate? This site aggregates feeds (only with permission!) from participating R blogs. The beginnings of each participating blog’s posts will automatically be displayed on the main page with links to the original posts; inside every post there is a link to the original blog and links to other related articles. While all participating blogs have links in the “Contributors” section of our sidebar

What does R-Bloggers offer it’s visitors?

• Discover (for all): Find new R blogs you didn’t know about. And Search in them for content you want.
• Follow (for people who don’t use RSS): Enter your e-mail and subscribe to receive a daily digest with teasers of new posts from participating blogs. You will more easily get a sense of hot topics in the R blogosphere.
• Connect (for facebook users): Click on “Fan this site” to become a “fan” of R Bloggers. You can then “friend” other people and share thoughts on our wall. Or just by leaving comments on the blog.
• Participate (for bloggers): Add your R blog to get increased visibility (for readers and search engines) with permanent links on our Contributors sidebar. Your blog will also gain visibility via our e-mail digest and through your presence on the main page with posts.

Who started R-Bloggers (and way)? R Bloggers was started by Tal Galili (well, me).  After searching for numerous R blogs I decided that there must be more R blogs our there then he knows about, and maybe the best way for finding them is to make them find him.

After writing about it in the R mailing list, I got some good feedbacks but also questions about why use only R blogs and not all the R feeds that exist. Who is the website actually for (when there are services like Google reader for us to read our feeds with), and what am I hoping it will do. So here is what I answered:

For me there are two audiences:
One is that of the web 2.0 power users. That is, people who know what RSS is and use it, maybe evern write their own blogs. These people have only one problem (as I see it) that R-bloggers tries to solve, and that is to know who else lives in their ecosystem. Who else they should follow.
For that, google reader recommendation system is great, but not enough. A much better system is if there was a one place where all R bloggers would go, write down their website, and all of us would know they exist. That is what R-bloggers offers for the power users. I think this is also why over 20 of them subscribed to the site RSS feed.
BTW, The origin of this idea came to me when I was trying to find all the dance bloggers for my wife (who is a dance researcher and blogger herself). After a while we started http://www.dancebloggers.com/ while knowing of only 10 bloggers. They list now has over 80 bloggers, most of which we would have not known about without this hub.
The same thing I am trying to do for the R community, that is way I hope more R bloggers would write about the service – so their network of readers which includes other R bloggers would add themselves and we will all know about them.
If that was my only purpose, a simple directory would have been enough. But I also have a second one and that is to help the second audience.

The second audience I am thinking of are people of our community who are not so much early adopters (and actually quite late adapters) of the new facilities that the new web (a.k.a: web 2.0) provides.
To them the all RSS thing is too much to look at, and they are used to e-mails. And because of that they are (until now) disconected from many of the R bloggers out there, simply because it is in-efficient for them to go through all these blogs each day (or even week). So for them, to see all the content in one place (and even get an e-mail about it) would be (I hope) a service. I believe that’s why 5 of them (so far) has subscribed via e-mail.
I also hope teachers will direct their students to this as a resource for getting a sense of what people who are using R are doing.
Another thing that hints me about the R community is seeing how the “facebook fan box” is still empty. Which tells me that (sadly) very few R users are actively using facebook as a means for connecting with the outer networks of people out there.

All I wrote also explains why R-bloggers will only take feeds of bloggers and only (as much as can be said) their posts that are centered around R (hence the website name ).
It both follows what Gabor talked about – having a site who’s content is only about R. But also what I wish, which is to have “content” in the sense of articles to read (mostly). And not so much things like news feeds of wikipedia or new packages published.

I hope this post will both notify people about this new resource, encourage more R bloggers to join, and will help for future people to better understand what this R-Bloggers thing is all about