Big Data BBQ

How do open source data analy­sis and visu­al­iza­tions by indi­vid­u­als com­pare to big data projects by data sci­en­tists using cut­ting edge soft­ware and infrastructure? Some clue may lie in look­ing at the impact of blog­ging on pro­fes­sional jour­nal­ism. A few years ago I worked for Lycos and helped launch a blog­ging tool. Blog­ging was pretty new then and Blog­ger, Type­pad, …

How to cat­e­go­rize Big Data Com­pa­nies? These com­pa­nies are a mix of star­tups and exist­ing com­pa­nies. One way to think of them is as fol­lows: Data: Com­pa­nies cre­at­ing data, seg­men­ta­tion, con­tent, data over­lays and repack­ag­ing of exist­ing data. (eg Rapleaf, Dow Jones, National Weather Ser­vice) Infra­struc­ture: Com­pa­nies cre­at­ing tools to man­age, store, deliver, opti­mize, mon­i­tor, or com­bine …

What is Big Data? There seem to be many def­i­n­i­tions and descrip­tions. One way to try an uncover what the term means is through word clouds and phrase clouds. Using ManyEyes, I visu­al­ized an arti­cle from O’Reilly enti­tled “What is Big Data?” . Here are the clouds: The tag cloud seems to do a bet­ter job of iden­ti­fy­ing …

A startup in Indi­anapo­lis Indi­ana called Ufla­vor has a process to cre­ate an infi­nite num­ber of soda fla­vors from a crowd-​sourced process. Inc Mag­a­zine just named them one of the three most inno­v­a­tive sites around social media. This presents an inter­est­ing prob­lem in data analy­sis: how to get insights or trends from the large vol­ume of data. The plan is …

What exactly is “big data”? Two inter­est­ing posts on the def­i­n­i­tion. First Andrew Brust on ZDNet offers a com­mon def­i­n­i­tion: Big Data is about the tech­nolo­gies and prac­tice of han­dling data sets so large that con­ven­tional data­base man­age­ment sys­tems can­not han­dle them effi­ciently, and some­times can­not han­dle them at all. ?He goes on to note that the term …

Big Data BBQ will focus on the emer­gence of big data — large vol­umes of data, ways to ana­lyze and find mean­ing in them, and meth­ods of visu­al­iz­ing and report­ing on data to make core busi­ness deci­sions. While it’s not a tech­ni­cal blog, at times it will look at the tech­ni­cal infra­struc­ture if it impacts com­bin­ing data and …