The Year in Posts

Looking back at posts in this blog over the last year I see a couple of themes emerge. Firstly there were many posts on technology and media, in particular several on the iPad which has had an extraordinary effect as the first device specifically designed for consuming media. Other issues of concern included television, 3D, aspect ratios and the problem of registration at web sites. We are going through huge changes in the media world as digitialization and the internet delivery system changes everything. I have written many posts on this in the past and I will continue to do so.

The SDForum Business Intelligence SIG that I chair had a banner year with so many memorable meetings, it is difficult to pick out the best one. A fantastic talk from Google Analytics Evangelist Avinash Kaushik on "Web Analytics 2.0" drew by far the biggest crowd. We had two great big data talks: "Winning with Big Data" from Michael Driscoll of Dataspora and "Mad Skills for Big Data" from Brian Dolan, both very impressive. Donovan Schneider from SalesForce.com spoke on "Real Time Analytics" and Dan Graham from Teradata spoke on "Data Management in the Cloud". Finally Peter Farago and Sean Byrnes of Flurry talked about the extraordinary information they collect about smartphone usage that they collect from their Mobile App analytics platform. Co-chair Paul O'Rorke who organized several of these meetings has stepped down and we will miss him greatly.

Finally, Blogger started collecting statistics in May of this year. Looking at the page views on this blog, my last post on "Windows File Type Fail" has generated a lot of interest in the few days since it was posted. The most viewed post is a 2009 post on "Ruby versus Scala" followed closely by the Windows post. In my view, the post last year about the Windows Autorun feature is a better rant than the current one. You can feel the veins bulging in that rant whereas this years rant is very laid back in comparison. Do not worry, there are many more misfeatures of Microsoft Windows to rant about so I am not going to run out of material for a long time.