Blog: Pete Loshin

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August 10, 2007

More Data Visualization Goodness

To see just how far we've come with new ways to look at business information derived from databases, check out Data Visualization: Modern Approaches, from Smashing Magazine, a web-zine for web-developers and designers.

Some of these new approaches may not be as cool as their creators might wish, but they certainly do look like a whole new revolution, especially if you can remember the revolution wrought by Lotus 1-2-3? Those simple pie and bar charts made then state-of-the-art greenbar printout reports look like something out of a cave.

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August 9, 2007

Welcome to the Future

We've all probably seen those "demotivational posters" by now; one I liked a lot read: If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon.

Why do I like it? Because maybe it'll be robots doing your job soon, or, maybe, it'll be the big scary Internets.

Case in point, a question raised on Ask Metafilter recently: How do i build a data warehouse that scrapes data from public websites for my own use? Tools? Tips?

Two things:

1. This is the kind of thing that gets asked--and answered in some detail--more and more frequently on the tech-oriented websites these days. Fairly straightforward, basic question, with (often) straightforward answers.


2. This is the kind of question that, not too long ago, served as the starting point for often lucrative consulting deals.

In other words, if you are in the business of providing solutions to business problems, it's becoming increasingly difficult to develop authoritative answers that are also exclusively your own--and better than what you could get by doing a bit of research with Google on your own.

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August 7, 2007

Time Magazine sez "Online Snooping Gets Creepy"

According to Time Magazine, Online Snooping Gets Creepy. I'm not so sure about that. Web "snooping" has always been more or less creepy in some ways, and more or less useful in others.

Time points to a new wave of search engines that supposedly go beyond and behind the web content that Google indexes to give an uncannily complete profile of whoever you want to "investigate". These include ZoomInfo, PeekYou, Pipl, Wink/, and Spock/.

I tried them out, using my own name since I can best judge the results (except for Spock, which was down for maintenance) and here are the results:

• As far as PeekYou is concerned, I don't exist. Boo.
• ZoomInfo came up with references to a lot of work I've done over the years that I sort of forgot about--as well as some "positions" with companies I'd never heard of. I even signed up for full (free) privileges, which wasn't too intrusive and gave me access to all the sources they cite. So, it's actually pretty useful, for me.
• Pipl gave me a lot of information, including links to places where my publications have been cited, as well as contact information. Pretty good, but it looks like a front-end to existing engines, including Google. OK.
• Wink found some stuff about me (including this blog), but seemed to miss a lot more. It does point to my LinkedIn profile, but otherwise it doesn't really find much else of interest.

How do they stack up to Google? Well, Google is still a more comprehensive search engine, pointing to a more complete set of my publications (books as well as articles published online), including lots of pointers to websites and blogs that seem to have "borrowed" my articles for their own use. Oh well.

If you're looking for someone's address, phone number or birthday, try Pipl; if you're looking for a terse and easy to understand (but possibly inaccurate) precis, try Wink. Otherwise, you might as well stick with Google, at least to start with.

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August 6, 2007

Hot New Blog: High Scalability

High Scalability is a new (not quite one month old) blog aiming to "bring together all the lore, art, science, practice, and experience of building scalable websites into one place so you can learn how to build your system with confidence."

Don't be fooled into thinking it's all about CSS or Apache configurations or stuff like that. Consider this: An Unorthodox Approach to Database Design : The Coming of the Shard. Now, blogger Todd Hoff may or may not be onto something entirely novel and unique with his concept of database "sharding" to distribute database storage and computation, but it is definitely interesting.

And he's got a lot of other good information here, such as a precis of the eBay Architecture, MySpace Architecture, and much more.

Great job, Todd, and keep it up!

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August 3, 2007

Data Visualization Fun

Everyone knows that on Star Trek, red-shirted crew members are more likely to get killed. For the science, statistics, and good visualization of that fact, check out Analytics According to Captain Kirk.

What's more important, though, is the way Matt Bailey wrote the article to demonstrate proven statistical techniques to generate intelligence (not really "business intelligence", though) from data. Even if the data is based on a bunch of made up stories that were (over)-acted out over 40 years ago.

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Quick MySQL Pointers

Looking for help with MySQL? Check out 20 Indispensible MySQL Resources for some helpful and interesting pointers.

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August 2, 2007

Something new to think about: "Attention Silos"

Is it a gimmick, or a business opportunity? Read Towards the Attention Economy: Will Attention Silos Ever Open Up? It'll get you thinking about all the data that is created in the course of websurfing.

How do you concatenate the data by-product of all those individual page views and other types of web activities related to a single web entity? But beyond that, how do you collect the data crop relating to a single individual across different web entities that individual interacts with?

What do you think? Is there a payoff somewhere to building these "attention silos"?

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