Business Intelligence Network business intelligence resources

Blog: Pete Loshin

« Time Magazine sez "Online Snooping Gets Creepy" | Main | More Data Visualization Goodness »

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.

  Posted by Pete Loshin on August 9, 2007 8:00 AM |

Comments

That's for sure. I stay abreast of most technical subjects via a network of contacts and blogs and the odd community site.

Metafilter is a pretty lousy example, although I liked the example question. I say "lousy" because they want people to pay them in order to post answers to questions, e.g. "pay us to post content we'll use" and that the people answering there didn't really give answers for the best options out there.

Posted by: mark | August 14, 2007 9:59 PM

Post a comment