Archive for March, 2010
Faceted Trust: From Fandango to Data Governance
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
Craig “Craig’s List” Newmark recently gave an interview to Mathew Ingram at Gigaom in which he called “some form of distributed trust system ‘the killingest of killer apps’ for the web over the next decade.” That’s because trust and identity are at the heart of the user experience on social sites, yet we have [...]
Oprah weighs in on facets
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
Don’t take your metadata advice from Oprah. Or from Lifehacker.
Lifehacker, a blog with tips that are usually excellent, missed in “Banish the Miscellaneous Category When You’re Organizing,” excerpted from an O!, The Oprah Magazine article called “The 10 Habits of Highly Organized People”:
Never label anything “miscellaneous”
You put a bunch of things into a file [...]
The hyping of the NoSQL foo
by Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari
Last week I discussed my impressions of the NoSQL movement, and because it’s such a fast-moving topic, I wanted to round up some interesting developments since then.
My main point in my last post was that NoSQL technology should not be defined diffusely as any of the new generation of databases. NoSQL is primarily motivated [...]
Even Trees Are Networks
by Pete Bell
Paul Sonderegger
We all know that trees start with roots, grow a trunk, then branches, and then keep branching all the way out to the leaves. But it turns out the leaves themselves don’t branch like that. Instead, according to a recent paper in Physical Review Letter, “Damage and Fluctuations Induce Loops in Optimal Transport Networks,” [...]
FT’s understatement on Newssift.com
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
Yesterday, the FT gave a statement to paidContent UK about shutting down Newssift.com:
“It’s the nature of digital media start-ups that not all work out, but we still firmly believe in the need to experiment and innovate. Newssift was a good idea, but the timing was unfortunate in that its launch coincided with the advertising [...]
In: Search/BI convergence, semantic web
IEEE works! But what works?
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
A few weeks back, I wrote about the innovative faceted search UI at IEEE’s new IEEE Xplore Digital Library site. Qualitatively, it seemed like a particularly strong implementation, but now there are metrics. Yesterday, Gerry Grenier, IEEE’s director of publishing technologies, tweeted their first results:
Since our launch of Xplore 3.0 on Feb 13 we [...]
Let’s not let “NoSQL” go the way of “Web 2.0”
by Adam Ferrari
Adam Ferrari
I get asked all the time whether Endeca should be considered a “NoSQL” database. It’s a totally reasonable question. After all, our core engine shares some attributes of a NoSQL system – it’s a persistent data store, has a non-relational data model, and has convenient APIs for developing web applications. And it works at [...]
The realpolitik of Search and BI project triggers
by Pete Bell
Pete Bell
I just attended IDC’s annual Directions conference in Boston, and of particular interest were back-to-back tracks on Search and BI. If you missed Directions in Boston, the West Coast performance comes this week in Santa Clara.
You’ll recall that IDC was the first of the big analysts to publish research on the convergence of search [...]
You Can’t Run A Company On A Single Version Of The Truth
by Paul Sonderegger
Paul Sonderegger
Last week’s Data Warehousing Institute conference (TDWI, for all you cool data people) is one of the big events for business intelligence (BI) professionals. I was there to check up on the state of the industry and get a peek into the future. And there’s a big contrast between the two.
Bill Baker, CTO of [...]
The tipping point: WhiteHouse.gov
by Vladimir Zelevinsky
Vladimir Zelevinsky
This will be a quick and happy post.
Each new technology has a tipping point (also see Geoffrey Moore’s “Crossing the Chasm”): as everything else in nature, the technology adoption process follows the bell curve. Before the tipping point, it’s a climb; after, it’s a roller coaster.
I just noticed that we have passed this [...]
