In addition to online courses and competitions, there are numerous websites and blogs publishing the latest developments in the data science community, their experience in attacking different problems, or just best practices. Some good starting points are as follows:

• KDnuggets: This is the de facto portal for data mining, analytics, big data, and data science, covering the latest news, stories, events, and other relevant issues at http://www.kdnuggets.com/.
• Machine Learning Mastery: This is an introductory-level blog with practical advice and pointers where to start. Check it out at http://machinelearningmastery.com/.
• Data Science Central: This consists of practical community articles on a variety of topics, algorithms, caches, and business cases at http://www.datasciencecentral.com/.
• Data Mining Research by Sandro Saitta at http://www.dataminingblog.com/.
• Data Mining: Text Mining, Visualization and Social Media by Matthew Hurst, which covers interesting text and web mining topics, frequently with applications to Bing and Microsoft at http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/.
• Geeking with Greg by Greg Linden, inventor of the Amazon recommendation engine and internet entrepreneur. You can check it out at http://glinden.blogspot.si/.
• DSGuide: This is a collection of over 150 data science blogs at http://dsguide.biz/reader/sources.