This is a guest blog post by Matthew Berk, Founder of Lucky Oyster. Matthew has been on the front lines of search technology for the past decade.

We are very excited to announce that blekko is donating search data to Common Crawl! Founded in 2007, blekko has created a new type of search experience that enlists human editors in its efforts to eliminate spam and personalize search.

We’re very excited to announce the winners of the First Ever Common Crawl Code Contest! We were thrilled by the response to the contest and the many great entries. Several people let us know that they were not able to complete their project in time to submit to the contest. We’re currently working with them to finish the projects outside of the contest and we’ll be showcasing some of those projects in the near future!

Do you have a project that you are working on for the Common Crawl Code Contest that is not quite ready? If so, you are not the only one. A few people have emailed us to let us know their code is almost ready but they are worried about the deadline, so we have decided to extend the deadline through the holiday weekend.

The prize package for the Common Crawl Code Contest now includes three Nexus 7 tablets thanks to TalentBin!

I am very happy to announce that Common Crawl has released 2012 crawl data as well as a number of significant enhancements to our example library and help pages.

Did you know that every entry to the First Ever Common Crawl Code Contest gets $50 in Amazon Web Services (AWS) credits? If you're a developer interested in big datasets and learning new platforms like Hadoop, you truly have no reason not to try your hand at creating an entry to the code contest!

We are excited to announce that Mat Kelcey has joined the Common Crawl Board of Advisors! Mat has been extremely helpful to Common Crawl over the last several months and we are very happy to have him as an official Advisor to the organization.

There is still plenty of time left to participate in the Common Crawl code contest! The contest is accepting entries until August 30th, why not spend some time this week playing around with the Common Crawl corpus and then submit your work to the contest?

Big Data Week aims to connect data enthusiasts, technologists, and professionals across the globe through a series of meet-ups. The idea is to build community among groups working on big data and to spur conversations about relevant topics ranging from technology to commercial use cases.

We're just one month away from one of the biggest and most exciting events of the year, O'Reilly's Open Source Convention (OSCON). This year's conference will be held July 16th-20th in Portland, Oregon.

Common Crawl has started talking with the Open Cloud Consortium (OCC) about working together. If you haven’t already heard of the OCC, it is an awesome nonprofit organization managing and operating cloud computing infrastructure that supports scientific, environmental, medical and health care research.

The following is a guest blog post by Pete Warden, a member of the Common Crawl Advisory Board. Pete is a British-born programmer living in San Francisco. After spending over a decade as a software engineer, including 5 years at Apple, he’s now focused on a career as a mad scientist.

At Common Crawl we've been busy recently! After announcing the release of 2012 data and other enhancements, we are now excited to share with you this short video that explains why we here at Common Crawl are working hard to bring web crawl data to anyone who wants to use it.

We're looking for students who want to try out the Apache Hadoop platform and get a technical report published.

Next week a few members of the Common Crawl team are going the Data 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

As part of our ongoing effort to grow Common Crawl into a truly useful and innovative tool, we recently formed an Advisory Board to guide us in our efforts. We have a stellar line-up of advisory board members who will lend their passion and expertise in numerous fields as we grow our vision.

Common Crawl is thrilled to announce that our data is now hosted on Amazon Web Services' Public Data Sets.

For the last few months, we have been talking with Chris Bizer and Hannes Mühleisen at the Freie Universität Berlin about their work and we have been greatly looking forward the announcement of the Web Data Commons.

Common Crawl on building an open Web-Scale crawl using Hadoop.

Hear Common Crawl founder discuss how data accessibility is crucial to increasing rates of innovation as well as give ideas on how to facilitate increased access to data.

Nova and Gil, in discussion with host Jason Calacanis, explore in depth what Common Crawl is all about and how it fits into the larger picture of online search and indexing.

Learn how you can harness the power of MapReduce data analysis against the Common Crawl dataset with nothing more than five minutes of your time, a bit of local configuration, and 25 cents.

A little under four years ago, Gil Elbaz formed the Common Crawl Foundation. He was driven by a desire to ensure a truly open web. He knew that decreasing storage and bandwidth costs, along with the increasing ease of crunching big data, made building and maintaining an open repository of web crawl data feasible.

Nova and Gil, in discussion with host Jason Calacanis, explore in depth what Common Crawl is all about and how it fits into the larger picture of online search and indexing. Underlying their conversation is an exploration of how Common Crawl's open crawl of the web is a powerful asset for educators, researchers, and entrepreneurs.

Common Crawl aims to change the big data game with our repository of over 40 terabytes of high-quality web crawl information into the Amazon cloud, the net total of 5 billion crawled pages.

In this post we respond to the most common questions. Thanks for all the support and please keep the questions coming!

We have started a Common Crawl discussion list to enable discussions and encourage collaboration between the community of coders, hackers, data scientists, developers and organizations interested in working with open web crawl data.