Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Kommentary on Wine 2

All:

I have no beef with Merlot or any other wine-fodder grape. Not sure what Paul Giamatti character’s issue was in the movie “Sideways.” Chalk it up to the picky fussbudget element of wine culture. I’ll drink pretty much any wine offered to me—and often enjoy it.

It’s not as if I’ve been overjoyed with every glass of wine I’ve ever consumed. Far from it. Too bitter, too sweet, too dry, too tannic, too fruity, too heavy, etc—some qualities ruin the wine-drinking experience for me. But it’s not as if I can associate these qualities with any type of grape, or any country or state of origin, or any vintner—or any other theme that would cause me to not request or purchase a particular wine again in the future.

The French didn’t invent wine, of course, but it seems they invented today’s hyper-analytic, hyper-anal wine culture. Their notion of “terroir” as wine’s mysterious gustatory differentiator seems t o me a clever way to brand their nation’s particular geography as the optimal wine-cultivation territory. I notice that the European Union has attempted to apply a diluted variant of “terroir”—origin-based branding--to wine and other consumables traditionally associated with those countries. Hence, “champagne” is only the stuff produced in and around Champagne, France; “cheddar cheese” only the milk processed in a certain method for that purpose around Cheddar, England UK; and so on.

All of this is a naked attempt by this nation-bloc to favor their domestic producers—and t hereby jack up their prices--by adding to some bogus snob appeal to their various, sundry, sordid, and assorted wares.

Jim

Kommentary on Obama 2

All:

This week, for the holidays, he and his family are back in Hawaii. Wish I could retire to a tropical place now and then. Anywhere I can collect my thoughts and breathe deeply without having to remind myself.

Clearly, the story of the year was the inauguration of the first US president of African descent. Whether or not you voted for him, this was an event of huge symbolic importance for our country.

It used to be said half-jokingly that Bill Clinton was, in effect, our first African-American president—if only because he connected exceptionally well with that demographic. A more plausible case could be made that Barack Obama is our first Asian-American president.

First, he grew up in Hawaii, which is our most Asian state demographically—and it’s in Polynesia, which was populated 1400 years ago by peoples who (it’s been shown through DNA analysis) originated in what’s now the Philippines and Taiwan.

Second, his mother married an Indonesian and had a daughter with him. President Obama had his Indonesian half-sister and her family over for Christmas this year. I don’t recall any mention of similar invites to his Kenyan half-siblings.

Third, he spent several years of his early childhood in Indonesia, educated in their schools and (I’m sure, though it’s never been mentioned) speaking their language. He must have endured teasing about his given name (which sounds like the Bahasa Indonesia word for a bodily function) from schoolyard bullies.

And finally, his statue has been erected at his former school in Jakarta. Indonesians feel as familial with our current president as the Irish did with John F. Kennedy.

Let’s just admit it: We elected the right president to lead us in second decade of what’s clearly becoming the Asian Century.

Jim

Kommentary on the Economy 2

All:

Stores and theaters were crowded this holiday season. I tend to avoid crowded places in holiday season. I don’t like to be jostled and rushed.

Jim

Kommentary on Memory 2

All:

Memory persists through systemic thinking.

When I want to remember a huge corpus of details, I build a system of some sort. The best mnemonic systems are those you superimpose over time and space, and which give those infinite coordinate systems some finite organic coherence.

Over time: I recently facebooked the year-by-year sequence of photo Xmas cards from my family between 1957 and 1983, encompassing my entire childhood and young adult years (plus my older brother Tom’s first year). Obviously, I had seen all of those photos all my life. But something about arranging them in the right sequence, and persisting them to a publicly accessible page, with jotted commentary, proved liberating. It’s only been a month so far since I posted them, but now my memories of those years feel like they’re anchored in something concrete: what my bros and I actually looked like in those years. Also, the concrete details of where we were: in and around our home, on vacation in the Smokies, etc.

That’s important. It’s important to remember that my 43-year-old memories were formed by 8-year-old James Kobielus, not by 51-year-old James Kobielus. You have to apply an aging filter to every memory in order not to be trapped by who you were then. Or who you are now.

It’s sort of like looking at the night sky. The light hitting your retinas is the collapsed superimposition of the radiant energy from those celestial objects at various ages and stages in their respective pasts. You can’t ponder that infinity unfiltered by that awareness.

It’s like directly staring into the sun. Don’t do it. You’ll go blind.

Jim

Kommentary on Yoga 2

All:

Posture is simply maintaining balance in any position—and in the transitions between positions. Balance is the most delicious of all feelings.

Jim

Kommentary on Media 2

All:

I saw an interesting comment over the weekend. Someone mentioned that MP3 players collapse decades into a single mash: all your favorite songs from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, and Aughts in the palm of your hand, available for endless rotation in your ears. Over the holiday, I put both the full Beatles stereo boxset on my Zune, plus the great “Monsters of Folk” collaboration by current greats Mike Mogis, Conor Oberst, M.Ward. and Yim Yames (trying hard not to let John, Paul, George, and Ringo crush those 4 dudes in my affections).

Someone asked whether this means nostalgia now rules, or whether it’s on the verge of overkill. My thought is that nostalgia was always an artifact of inaccessibility. The past always feels sweeter when you can’t fully recall it. When it’s a struggle to reconnect with it, it somehow feels more precious, and the too-accessible present more crass.

My feeling is that the corpus of human artistic expression—past and present, frozen and evolving—must always be readily at hand. Only then do you realize that now, and all the fresh new creation—easily stands up to the old.

Jim

Kommentary on Commentary 2

COMMENT

Deaden the anger with air
and a prayer for forgiveness.

Live it through. A sore outlasts
its irritant: a pain, the

point. A rash word holds the hurt
in the firmament of the

world’s regard. Curse: a comet
impressed into flesh’s fate,

a stone with a name, a mark
and a flame returning. Leave

these currents burn. Let the night
reset what day has torn. Pray

it take this weary frame. Void
me now in the calm to come.

Sunday, December 27, 2009

Kommentary on Wine

All:

Love the stuff. Not so crazy about wine culture: the province of hairsplitting fussbudgets. Also, it stains the teeth. And what’s with corks, anyway?

Jim

Kommentary on Obama

All:

On the whole, a productive first 11 months in office. He’s implementing the agenda that I voted for. He’s had the guts to use his first-year mandate to effect some long-overdue unfinished business (most notably, reforming this country’s wretched healthcare insurance laws), reverse some of the most damaging policies of the previous administration (most notably, the anti-civil-libertarian climate that followed 9/11), and set a course for the coming decade’s key priorities (most notably, engagement with the rest of the world on systemically dealing with global climate change).

The calendar year ends with the insane new-messiah hype largely behind us, and with our president’s popular-approval ratings roughly where they should be. As the first anniversary of Barack Obama’s inauguration nears, it’s clear that he’s fundamentally a pragmatic centrist, much in the same vein as Bill Clinton. Consequently, he’ll continue to anger both the left and (especially) the right with his back-and-forthing on issues, in order to build the coalitions necessary for governance of this highly polarized nation. To the extent the Republicans continue to refuse to meet him halfway, the Democrats will have to tighten their voting bloc, lest they fall victim to the same ideological obstructionism that beset Clinton in the 90s.

Here’s hoping the New Year delivers the health-insurance reform that this country has needed for ages. Here’s also hoping that President Obama remains the cool, rational, remorseless policymaker t hat we voted into office last year. With the massive federal deficit that Bush dropped in his lap, he will need to make some serious cuts in federal spending—or hope for a stunning economic boom—in order to avoid driving the country into bankruptcy.

Jim

Kommentary on the Economy

All:

As the Aughts recede into history, it’s clear that we’re moving into an entirely new energy era, and that the seeds of the new world economy are sprouting.

The world now realizes that energy monocultures are foolish. Just as pre-industrial economies denuded their landscapes of trees into order to heat their homes, we’ve spent the last 100+ years sucking, scraping, and distilling every last drop of petroleum from the earth below our feet. We all realize now that continuing to rely so heavily on this one fuel source, so unevenly distributed across nation-states, creates the conditions for a possible nuclear World War III some day. Just as horrid as that conflagration would be a Malthusian nightmare of several billion people starving, freezing, and stranded without the juice to power their now-obsolete “high technology.”

Interestingly, in spite of all the shocks of the past 10 years, it’s now clear how the world economy is retooling itself to reduce this overdependence on one fuel source. No one alternative has emerged to petroleum, but, rather, a smorgasbord of many sources—wind, solar, biomass, natural gas, geothermal, etc—plus new technologies, patterns, and ways of living to mix-and-match them. Market forces continue to push any and all of them more deeply into all areas of our lives, and, of course, to encourage more efficient consumption and even improved petroleum exploration.

A supranational market economy has proven to be humanity’s best shock absorber for adapting to the new energy order. Perhaps in the coming decade some startling new set of energy technologies—perhaps radically improved electrical transmission, storage, and/or generation—will come to the fore that either a) makes for a more sustainable “grid,” b) allows us all to sustain our economy completely off the “grid,” and/or c) allows us to take either approach.

What’s truly cool is that we now realize that we’re not necessarily fated to a 100-percent on-grid economy.

Jim

Kommentary on Memory

All:

Remember where you were, or what you were doing, when you first heard the big news on September 11, 2001? Of course you think you do. I think I do. I saw the first news reports in the Yahoo news headlines in my personal homepage. I then quickly checked the date in my computer’s system clock, in the lower right corner of my Windows XP tower system. I still have that system. It and the clock still work.

Jim

Kommentary on Yoga

All:

In this decade I discovered the calming power of good posture.

Jim

Kommentary on Media

All:

Television has loosened its grip on our consciousness. There’s more of it now than ever, of course, but we spend far less time staring at a physical object called a “television.” We carry our video on media players and are far less likely to navigate the feeds with some physical object called a “remote control.” We also are far less likely to guide our viewing experience by thumbing through a physical “tv guide” publication of any sort.

Television, like radio, newspapers, movies, books, and music, is just a pattern of mediated experience. All of it is just a deepening continuously updating collage of human expression and experience

Our consciousness is more mediated than ever before, but not through any distinct set of physical objects that have any deep hold on our awareness. Your iPhone and iPod will be obsolete by the end of the coming decade. Probably well before then.

Jim

Kommentary on Commentary

All:

We need to free ourselves from authoritative opinion. Spewing from every source, commentary is now so ubiquitous that we increasingly have no clue who or what is an unimpeachable authority on any topic. To the extent that you yourself correlate and synthesize disparate commentary into your own perspective, you’re the authority. And you should be. Once you figure “it” out, whatever “it” may be, please put it online. I’d like to reference you.

Jim

Monday, December 21, 2009

A quick look back at the decade soon ending

All:

Just a few thoughts as we move into the new decade.

At one point in my career, I thought I'd try my hand at writing books. When this current decade began, I was beginning to write my second tech book. This one was about version 1.0 of Microsoft's BizTalk middleware product. The book itself, for Prentice Hall PTR, tanked in the marketplace. You can blame it on the dotcom bust that was happening during that period. Or blame it on the glut of BizTalk books. Or on the generally lackluster sales of most business tech books.

But I didn't write that book, or the first (on a workflow topic, just 3 years before), to get rich. I just wanted to stretch myself, to see if I could sustain a single topic over, say, 400 pages or so. But, even more fundamentally, I just wanted to deposit particular intuitions into the public record. After finishing the BizTalk book, I realized that my psychic payoff was simply being able to publish the following three paragraphs:

“We live in the age of network software, in which shapes fresh from someone's imagination can enrich--or imperil--our lives almost overnight.

This book was written in the year 2000. It is a year that some thought would arrive with a great network cataclysm triggered by a tiny little programming shortcut. It is also a year in which viruses, worms, zombies, and other invisible network beasties regularly made the headlines and showed just how vulnerable the online economy is to sabotage from anyone with a phone line.

But modern society has shown surprising resiliency in the face of these network-borne threats. This is also a time of unprecedented prosperity and economic growth, an era of grand plans. 2000 is the tenth year of an economic expansion that has buoyed the United States and other developed nations. Almost spontaneously, the global economy has begun to re-engineer itself around the World Wide Web, a computer networking architecture that was little more than a laboratory curiosity when the long expansion began. No one knows with any certainty how far the Web will penetrate and reshape everyday life. And no one really knows how far the demands of round-the-clock e-commerce will drive the Web's technical evolution. We race headlong into this new online marketplace, not fully understanding what makes it all tick or what can bring it crashing down. But here we sit, hands on mice, watching the possibilities unfurl and surfing a wave of continuous innovation.”

Now, as the Millennium enters its Teens, the Internet remains the single most fundamental force reshaping the world economy. Even as economic and political forces swing back and forth, the Internet just deepens its penetration into every facet of life.

Funny how I don't aspire to writing books anymore. Even blogs (a word and concept few of us knew in 2000) feel too long. Somehow, we're all now distilling our choicest thoughts to mere 140-character sentences--some strange new epigram called a "tweet," the best of which scoot around the world at lightning speed.

Now, I simply aspire to observe change as it happens, and comment, using any medium available.

Friday, December 18, 2009

Articles I glanced at this past week: dec 14-18 2009

Leading Twitter Video Site, TwitVid.com Launches Suite of New Features

Actuate Extends Spirit of Community Collaboration With BIRT Performance Scorecard 9

Microsoft Buys Opalis To Bolster Physical, Virtual Data Center Automation

Amazon EC2 Cloud Data Center Loses Power

Eric Schmidt's privacy policy is one scary philosophy

Facebook Still a Hotbed of Identity Theft, Study Claimshttp://lm.pcworld.com/t/794715/5553367/36903/0/Should Microsoft Dump its Phone Efforts?http://lm.pcworld.com/t/794715/5553367/36904/0/
Will Lala Power Web-Based iTunes?http://lm.pcworld.com/t/794715/5553367/36905/0/

Google Releases Experimental Phone to Employeeshttp://lm.pcworld.com/t/795533/5553367/36955/0/

Databases and Data Access: Data in Flighthttp://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1667562http://www.sqlstream.com/

Microsoft acquires Opalis and Sentillion

Internet Society invests in W3C

Google and the Schmidt-Schneier Privacy Duel

Around the World: Despite the cost, SSDs are a great value

Oracle's pledges on MySQL are 'purely cosmetic', say critics

Cognos 9 to 'embed' SPSS, add social networking

Preparing Students for Analytics, the IBM Way

Is it really "game over" for Microsoft's consumer business?

2010 a Boom Year for Cloud Computing?

Google's Nexus One smartphone: Will mobile ads offset cost? http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/5993396/361089/246294/0/

Google's 'Nexus One' Test Phone: Details Emerge http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/5993396/361089/246295/0/

Twitter rival Plurk claims UI, code ripped off by Microsoft Chinahttp://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/5993396/361089/246297/0/

Plurk users bring microblogging to many languageshttp://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/5993396/361089/246298/0/

Teradata Establishes Information Security Center of Excellence http://media.prnewswire.com/en/jsp/latest.jsp?resourceid=4138336&access=EH

Amazon Auctions Cloud Computation

Oracle Mobilizing MySQL Users

What Do Oracle's MySQL Promises Amount To?

Nexus One Google Phone: Sorting Fact From Fiction

Global CIO: Why SAP Won't Match Oracle's 22% Maintenance Fees

Finding Talent Via Social Networks

Is A Cloud Computing "Catastrophe" Coming in 2010?

Research Firms Agree: 2010 Will Mark A Return To Growth

Oracle Extends Governance, Risk, Compliance App Suite

SAP Outlines Five-Year Enterprise Software Plan

Amazon creates cloud computing spot market

Hybrid Clouds: The Best Of Both Worlds?

Amazon Launches 'Name Your Price' Cloud Computing

Preston Gralla: Is Ray Ozzie on the way out at Microsoft?

Peter Schooff: Top 10 BI Predictions for 2010

David Linthicum: 4 Data Integration Predictions for 2010

NEW STUDY: DATA QUALITY PLAYING ROLE IN THE RISE OF MDM PROJECTS
http://go.techtarget.com/r/10340722/2433922

Google Search Appliance Now Indexes Twitter Tweets

Transforming ETL Logic into Data

Social Media’s a Victim of its Success

SOA governance's move into the clouds

Microsoft Halts Microblog Service Accused of Copying Plurk
http://lm.pcworld.com/t/798288/5553367/37749/0/

Link Shortening Mania: Goo.gl, Fb.me and Bit.ly Join Fray
http://lm.pcworld.com/t/798288/5553367/37754/0/

KXEN Conference Highlights Value of Data Mining to Building Success in a Downturn

XO Communications Rings Netezza for Advanced Analytics

Microsoft Launches, Pulls, Twitter-Style Microblog

Sybase is latest RDB maker to embrace MapReduce
http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/5996075/361089/246792/0/

Microsoft admits Plurk code was stolen
http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/5996075/361089/246797/0/

Bolt from the blue

Top of Mind - Data in the Cloud

Amazon Web Services Introduces Media Streaming to Its Content Delivery Service Amazon CloudFront

Sybase is latest DBMS maker to embrace MapReduce

BI: The Year in Review

That Was the Year That Was: Major Data Warehousing Events of 2009 (and Predictions for 2010)

The Year Ahead: IT in Transition, BI Rising

Q&A: Understanding Private vs. Public Clouds

IBM to Apply Analytics to Improve Customer Service and Loyalty http://media.prnewswire.com/en/jsp/latest.jsp?resourceid=4140135&access=EH

IBM to Apply Analytics to Improve Customer Service and Loyalty http://media.prnewswire.com/en/jsp/latest.jsp?resourceid=4140135&access=EH

IBM Expands Offerings to Help Businesses Simplify and Manage Advanced Systems Software Development
http://media.prnewswire.com/en/jsp/latest.jsp?resourceid=4140244&access=EH

IBM to Acquire Lombardi

Google Delivers GWT 2.0

Twitter Planning Chirp Developer Conference

Google, Bit.ly in Brevity Battle Over Short URLs

Rainstor launches cloud database for big data archiveshttp://go.techtarget.com/r/10359303/2433922

Amazon adds media streaming to content delivery service
http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/5997323/361089/247152/0/

IBM buying BPM vendor Lombardi
http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/5997323/361089/247153/0/

IBM Acquiring BPM Software Developer Lombardi

Advanced Analytics Predictions For 2010

Actuate Brings Innovation to Performance Management

Monte Carlo, Resampling and BI – Part 1

Unstructured Text Analytics: Real Uses May Be Hidden

Why you need an information governance strategy for 2010

Google's Nexus One Specs Leakedhttp://lm.pcworld.com/t/799850/5553367/38248/0/

The Social Facebook Fiasco

Google Search Appliance Now Finds Tweets Google Boosts Android Maps

Siperian Launches New Solution to Help Financial Services Companies 'Operationalize' Customer Centricity
http://media.prnewswire.com/en/jsp/latest.jsp?resourceid=4141498&access=EH

Are Microsoft's Best Days Behind It?

Google upgrades Analytics API

MySQL creator launches campaign to 'save' database

Rogue antivirus lurks behind Google Doodle searches
http://cwflyris.computerworld.com/t/5998364/7006276/247279/0/

Overlooking Problems with Oracle's Exadata

IBM Buying Lombardi: A BPM Bauble on Big Blue's Christmas Tree?

BI or Analytics? "'T Ain't What You Do"

HP products target hybrid cloud computing

SOAP gets the honor among 'worst tech of the decade'

Will Google become a hardware company in 2010?

That new piece in the sequence of tweet-originated pieces since I started tweeting in March of this year

TWT1

sometimes thought seems solid as sinew tendon muscle bone can strain sprain break bleed but no though real is immaterial as air not there

TWT2

hollywood splashcuts explosive screams over under explanation plot machinery all wheels turning no internal combustion

TWT3

megaspectacle and nanoresponse a corneal aberration obliterates several dozen adjacent galaxies

TWT4

a fallen faultline slippage of continents is as cracks in a mudplain signal the escarpment between elastic floodtimes

TWT5

yes there was a guild for gold the florentine strapmakers maintained tenuous alliances even metalsmiths amalgamated

TWT6

within the walled civita were barriers still restraint and regulation on common observance yet goats were known to roam

TWT7

the high-peaked hat of the magistrate was his most distinguished the cathedral vault within which ceremonies were administered

TWT8

automatic as dumb & rash commentary split-screen supplies pretext shares subconscious invites u to fill in the obvious tinyURLs tend to rule

TWT9

a fax a fedex a telex a xerox and a text were arranged along the counter by heft and proximity one of them didn't belong no one let on

TWT10

Snow's no worry. Flurries no worry. No need to hurry & scurry. Sit still--the flakes will fall & drape those worries in soft white slurry.

poem TWT10

TWT10

Snow's no worry. Flurries no worry. No need to hurry & scurry. Sit still--the flakes will fall & drape those worries in soft white slurry.

Tuesday, December 15, 2009

FORRESTER blog repost Advanced analytics predictions for 2010

Advanced analytics predictions for 2010

By James Kobielus

As we bid adieu to one decade and move into the next, it’s important to catch our collective breath and to take a quick look ahead. Here are some quick thoughts on the trends that will shape advanced analytics in the year to come. These trends will set the stage for thoroughgoing transformation of business intelligence (BI), data warehousing (DW), predictive analytics (PA), data mining (DM), business activity monitoring (BAM), complex event processing (CEP), and other key analytics technologies in the Teens:

* Self-service operational BI puts information workers in driver’s seat: Enterprises have begun to adopt self-service BI to cut costs, unclog the analytics development backlog, and improve the velocity of practical insights. Users are demanding tools to do interactive, deeply dimensional exploration of information pulled from enterprise data warehouses, data marts, transactional applications, and other systems. In 2010, users will flock to self-service BI offerings as the soft economy keeps pressure on IT budgets. Also fueling this trend is the increasing frustration that information workers feel in the face of long backlogs on seemingly mundane BI service requests. In the coming year, BI software as a service (SaaS) subscription offerings will be particularly popular, in a market that has already become fiercely competitive. So will the new generation of BI mashup offerings for premises-based deployment, especially mashup-oriented BI tools from IBM Cognos and Microsoft.

* User-friendly predictive modeling comes to the information workplace: Predictive analytics can play a pivotal role in day-to-day business operations. If available to information workers—not just to Ph.D. statisticians and professional data miners—predictive modeling tools can help business people continually tweak their plans based on flexible what-if analyses and forecasts that leverage both deep historical data as well as fresh streams of current event data. In 2010, user-friendly predictive modeling tools will increasingly come to market, either as stand-alone offerings or as embedded features of companies’ BI environments. Many BI vendors will add predictive modeling to their current offerings—most notably, IBM will converge its Cognos BI and new SPSS data mining offerings—with a focus on mass-market usability. By the same token, established predictive modeling vendors such as SAS, IBM SPSS, KXEN, Angoss, and Portrait Software will highlight and deepen their existing usability features, such as wizard-driven automation and interactive visualization, to speed information workers through the complex steps for building, validating, and exploring predictive models. Just as significant, in-memory BI clients—such as those from TIBCO Spotfire and QlikTech--provide an important alternative to traditional data mining tools for subject matter experts who wish to explore a multivariate data set from all angles without having to do heavy-hitting data preparation, clustering, and classification beforehand.

* Advanced analytics sinks deep roots in the data warehouse: Advanced analytics demands a high-performance data management infrastructure to handle data integration, statistical analysis, and other compute-intensive functions. In-database analytics is an emerging practice under which those and other resource-intensive processes can be parallelized and thereby accelerated across one or more data warehousing nodes. In-database analytics enables flexible deployment of a wide range of resource-intensive functions—such as data mining and predictive modeling—to a cluster, grid, or cloud of high-performance analytic databases. In 2010, in-database analytics will become a new best practice for data mining and content analytics, in which the enterprise data warehousing professionals must now collaborate closely with the subject matter experts who build and maintain predictive models. To support heterogeneous interoperability for in-database and in-cloud analytics, open development frameworks-- especially MapReduce and Hadoop—will be adopted broadly by data warehousing and analytics tools vendors. In the coming year, we’ll also see the beginning of an industry push toward an open development framework for inline predictive models that can be deployed to CEP environments. Already, IBM and TIBCO have developed interesting, albeit proprietary, support for in-CEP predictive analytics. Clearly, in-CEP predictive analytics will be a critical component of truly adaptive BAM for process analytics.

* Social network analysis bring powerful predictive analysis to the online economy: Before long, social networks will pervade all business and personal applications, including all mobile, broadband, and streaming media services. From an enterprise perspective, social networks are the buzz that can spell the difference between success and failure in a reputation-driven online economy. In 2010, enterprises will avidly adopt social network monitoring and marketing tools, while deploying advanced analytics to search for opportunities to better reach customers in these environments. Forrester sees 2010 as the year social network analysis truly emerges as the new frontier in advanced analytics, supporting mining of behavioral, attititudinal, and other affinities among individuals. Social network analysis thrives on the deepening streams of information—structured and unstructured, user-generated and automated—that emanate from Facebook, Twitter, and other new Web 2.0 communities. In the coming year, many vendors of predictive modeling tools will enhance their social network analysis features to support real-time customer segmentation, target marketing, churn analysis, and anti-fraud. The killer app for all this will become the real-time “next best offer” that your contact center makes from all this intelligence, or the marketing campaign you re-arrange on the fly to save it from near-failure.

* Low-cost data warehousing delivers fast analytics to the midmarket: Though enterprises can certainly do BI without a data warehouse, this critical infrastructure platform is essential for high-performance reporting, query, and analytics against large data sets. In one of the most important BI trends of the past several years, the price of a fully configured data warehousing appliance platform has dropped by an order of magnitude and, with the development of public SaaS DW cloud services, it will continue to decline. In 2010, many data warehousing vendors will lower the price of their basic appliance products to less than $20,000 per usable terabyte, which constitutes the new industry threshold pioneered by Oracle, Netezza, and other leading DW vendors. At the same time, enterprises will see a growing range of cost-effective solution appliances in 2010, combined DW appliances with preconfigured BI, advanced analytics, data cleansing, industry information models, and other data management applications and tools.

* Data warehousing virtualizing into the cloud: The data warehouse, like all other components of the BI and data management infrastructure, is entering the cloud. In 2010, we’ll see vendors continue to introduce cloud, SaaS, and virtualized deployments of their core analytic databases. To support flexible mixed-workload analytics, the EDW, over the coming 5-10 years, will evolve into a virtualized cloud that allows data to be transparently persisted in diverse physical and logical formats to an abstract, seamless grid of interconnected memory and disk resources that can support diverse workloads, latencies, and topologies. Massive parallelism, all-in-memory architectures, solid-state drives, and virtualized storage will increasingly revolutionize EDW environments—both cloud- and appliance-based—over this coming decade. In 2010, we will see most EDW vendors roll out pioneering offerings that offer all of these architectural innovations. However, 2010 will not be the “year of the cloud” for the DW industry as a whole, since Teradata, Oracle, IBM, Microsoft, and others will still be rolling out their initial public/private cloud platform services and partnerships. Nevertheless, the industry is moving inevitably toward cloud-based services that supplement appliances, licensed software, and other deployment options.

In developing my 2010 research agenda, I have incorporated all of these themes. I look forward to your feedback, inputs, and suggestions as we move into the new year.

Sunday, December 13, 2009

Aweekstweets December 6-13 2009—approaching solstice

TECH-AND-TECH-INDUSTRY TWEETS

Anybody who's focusing on what SQL can't do is implying SQL was intended to be the be-all language for info access/manipulation. Get real. about 3 hours ago from TweetDeck

JK2—SQL is purely to access and manipulate structured, relational, tabular data sets. But, considering that there is far more unstructured and semi-structured information out there, it’s probably best that we don’t try to force-fit SQL into all of that. Considering the range of access protocols in SOA, Web 2.0, and other services environments, it’s better to treat SQL as just one language to be supported in a broader information virtualization environment.

Starting to think ParAccel's "FasterOrFree" program is pioneer of new pricing model in DW market. Vendors put their money where mouths are. about 3 hours ago TweetDeck

JK2—This is the only sustainable value-based pricing model in the DW market. Vendors will continue to assert 10x and greater performance improvements vis-à-vis the completion, or vis-à-vis their previous versions, or vis-à-vis what customers are doing now. The only way for the poor customer to know if these claims hold water is for the vendor to demonstrate this enhanced performance on the customer’s own queries and data sets. If the vendor can demonstrate an order-of-magnitude improvement, they can justifiable charge customers a premium. If they can’t, the vendor should bear the financial risk for its hype, and give the solution to the customer for free (if they’ll have it). Secondary issue: Whether the vendor should also provide free or discounted maintenance, support, and upgrades, and for how long.

Have a briefing just a few minutes from now with Kognitio, a provider of DW software, appliance, and cloud solutions. about 4 hours ago from TweetDeck

JK2—These guys are one of several pure-plays with the full range of DW form factors (note: when I said “cloud” in this tweet, I meant public “SaaS,” which Kognitio calls “DaaS”). About half of Kognitio’s revenues come from DaaS customers. Considering that Kognitio has been offering this for several years, I consider them one of the most mature providers of “DW in the cloud.” In other words, they’re just a little ahead of the market—though, of course, Aster, Vertica, and a few others offer public cloud/SaaS-based DW services.

Actionable analytics: let users mine & interactively explore non-obvious patterns, while making most salient points blindingly user-obvious about 4 hours ago from TweetDeck

JK2—The core definition of data mining is that it identifies non-obvious patterns in historical data sets. But all of this statistical gold digging can’t serve business if it doesn’t produce a steady stream of nuggets meaningful to business people who don’t have degrees in advanced math.

Taking briefing from ParAccel...significant customers wins, pipeline, deal size growth....excellent momentum 11:15 AM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

JK2—I like to take refresher briefings from all DW vendors every 3-6 months. With ParAccel, they’ve benefited from the steady growth in the DW space as a whole, but also from their own aggressive pricing, marketing, and sales—plus outstanding progress on scaling their massively parallel DW appliance up and out.

Social network analysis (SNA) not just for social networks in Web 2.0 sense. SNA research shows loneliness contagious (http://bit.ly/6qr2Lx) 8:48 PM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

JK2—Just curious: Do those online dating services use social network analysis to identify those myriad “dimensions of compatibility”? If so, do they update those models based on actual results, in terms of people hooking up—or not--based on those dimensions? Or that all pure hogwash? Preying on the desperation of lonely people?

"Google turns on real-time search" (http://bit.ly/74UJT2) JK--Be curious to see if/when Google turns it into real-time srch-powered BI SaaS 12:26 PM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

JK2—Just curious, nothing more. Seeing as how Google has made so little headway in the enterprise market, I doubt they could make much of a go with a BI SaaS service. I do expect Microsoft to integrate Bing technology into their BI stack in the next 2-3 years. Calling Bing a “decision engine,” and giving it a name that begins with “B-I” sort of hints at that direction.

RT @daniel_abadi: "[SSD-to-disk] bang difference is small for seq wklds, & buck diff is big": JK--Now it is. But I'm pointing 10 yrs ahead. 2:54 PM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—Solid state drives offer order-of-magnitude performance, reliability, and power-consumption advantages over traditional storage media. No one seriously doubts that rotating media will disappear over the next decade or so. Cost parity (per TB) will be achieved by the middle of the ‘10s.

RT @daniel_abadi "SSDs... orthogonal to whether SSD will drive DW growth" JK--Disagree. Lo-cost SSDs will deliver superior DW bang4buck 2:29 PM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—SSDs will become the preferred storage technology in DW appliances by 2015, I predict.

RT @merv @daniel_abadi "data doesn't grow because of HW, but in spite of limitations #PB" JK--Right. As I said, HW economics a gating factor 2:25 PM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—As the list price of DW appliances approaches $2,000/TB (one-tenth of today’s leading-edge $20,000/TB), the average size of enterprise DWs will grow by a factor of ten: into the 100s of TBs. That will be in the middle of the coming decade. As the list price of DW appliances drops by yet another order of magnitude (to $200/TB), the average size of enterprise DWs will reach the petabyte level. That will be the end of the coming decade.

RT @daniel_abadi "disks will still be used at [petabyte] scale" JK--Yes, but in declining proportion to SSD, which will dominate by 2019 12:49 PM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—In 10 years, you will be as likely to find a rotating disk on a new DW appliance as you are to find a tape drive on today’s appliances.

RT @CurtMonash "1000x in 10 years is annual doubling. Seems little high to me" JK-Content analytics + cheap SSD will drive annual doubling 11:22 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—Think of all the unstructured and semi-structured content streaming in social networks. Think of all the information in your enterprise’s content management systems. Think of all the compliance-relevant data in your e-mail systems. Think of all the audit logs in all of your transactional systems. Think of all the years worth of historical information you will want to persist from all applications. Think of all the streaming event data you will need to aggregate to drive complex event processing applications. Annual doubling? That’ll sound quaint when your tsunami demands annual quadrupling and beyond.

"The Tech Industry's 10 (Not So) Dirty Words" (http://bit.ly/7sC5G3): JK--What? Are they outsourcing tech magazine writing to fratboys? 10:11 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—The only word in the bunch that Beavis and Butt-Head would have snickered at is “dongle.”

"Google Helps Publishers Erect Pay Walls" (http://bit.ly/4KBSUd): JK--In some ideological circles, this blatantly violates "don't do evil." 10:02 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—Can someone point to a specific business opportunity that Google refused on the grounds that it would have required them to undertake a joint venture with Lucifer?

RT @CurtMonash: @jameskobielus "If average DW is in low petabytes in 10 years, where do you place it today?" JK--Low terabytes:1-10TB. 9:52 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—More than three-quarters of today’s DWs are in this range, by my rough reckoning.

I visit Bing as much for the new photos on home page as for search capabilties. Google's interface, even with seasonal typeface, bores me. 9:51 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—And, quite frankly, search engines strike me as deadly dull. Albeit indispensable.

"Google Chrome OS is 10 Years From Broad Enterprise Adoption" (http://bit.ly/4B19bR): JK--Excuse me, but that's the equivalent of "never." 9:48 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—Without a strong open-source push, it’s not at all clear that Google Chrome can ever gain broad adoption. Linux is there, and it’s done it in a decade or so.

RT @bmichelson "2010: Rise of Event Processing" (http://bit.ly/6LLYO3): JK--Predictive analytics: better u see future, better 2 drive change 9:35 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—I’m a bit jaded about event processing becoming the next big thing. It’s big, all right, and it coming to the BI space in a big way, but it’s not a new thing, and not something that will burst into universal adoption anytime soon. Some analysts have been claiming for several years that “event driven architecture” is the next big thing.

"What IBM's Acq Of Guardium Really Means" (http://bit.ly/5Nta5S): JK--IBM should build InfoSphere event DW platform for DB security events. 9:26 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—Event processing can be the next big thing in specific application domains. Event data warehousing, for example, which could provide log aggregation for security, e-discovery, and predictive analytics.

RT @teradatanews @jameskobielus "[DWs] tend to mash [all analytics] into a single [virtualized, distributed pool of data]" 9:16 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—In Q1, I’ll be developing a Forrester report on virtualizing the DW in to the cloud, and evolving it into a complex content warehouse for advanced analytics.

RT @gilbaneboston #gilbane09 "Linguistics vs statistics 2 ends of spectrum of search technologies" JK--Mine the words vs. mind the numbers 8:20 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—Social network analysis is all about mining the statistical patterns in people’s behavior. It’s also about mining the substance of the things they say—to each other, to each other, and to no one in particular. What’s on their minds. And how their thoughts surface aspects of a collective social intelligence.

Forrester clients tell me they plan to keep core EDWs no larger than 10TB for foreseeable future. Reason? Expensive storage. 8:17 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—Bring down the cost of storage, and the average EDW will grow accordingly. Pent-up demand.

True gating factor in DW growth is storage cost. Universal adoption of cloud storage for staging, archiving, backup will light the fuse. 8:11 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—Public cloud storage is where petabytes will enter the enterprise DW picture. Through outsourcing of staging, archiving, and backup to cost-effective, scalable clouds.

RT @CurtMonash (http://bit.ly/7tfwhU): "Framework for DW growth" JK--Moore's Law-like growth call for avg DW in lo-petabytes within 10 years 8:06 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

JK2—Remember that Moore’s Law is just a trending rule of thumb. It’s not actually written into the immutable laws of the universe.

OLAP is all about fast, flexible, multidimensional queries against large, prejoined, structured data sets. Not great cocktail party talk. 9:27 PM Dec 6th from TweetDeck

JK2—Social networking isn’t great cocktail party talk either. It’s become so common that it’s now like discussing who’s got the coolest e-mail signature. Best experienced, not discussed.

Yes, @NeilRaden & @TonyBaer, OLAP is sclerotic topic. @bevelson and I define it as "spreadsheet pivot table on steroids." 9:23 PM Dec 6th from TweetDeck

JK2—One big difference: Using OLAP won’t get you suspended from Major League Baseball.

SHAMELESS-SELF-PROMOTION TWEETS

"Data Analytics and Cloud Computing: Convergence or Collision?". Greenplum & #Forrester Tues Dec 15 1:30-2:30 PM EST (http://bit.ly/2cPRqv) 34 minutes ago from TweetDeck

Yes, I'm becoming one of the pod people. about 4 hours ago from TweetDeck

On Tuesday, I do a podcast with @greenplum and #Forrester colleague @frankgillett on DW, analytics, and the cloud. about 4 hours ago from TweetDeck

RT @jameskobielus: On Tuesday, I do a DM Radio podcast with Sybase on in-database analytics (http://bit.ly/8sMlTa): JK--Also w/ Fuzzy Logix. about 4 hours ago from TweetDeck

On Tuesday, I do a DM Radio podcast with Sybase on in-database analytics (http://bit.ly/8sMlTa). about 4 hours ago from TweetDeck

On Monday, I record podcast with @AsterData & @Dana_Gardner on convergence of transactions and analytics. about 4 hours ago from TweetDeck

RT @DataInfoCom: Podcast: Instrumenting Your Enterprise For Maximum Predictive Power http://bit.ly/85Ro8U: JK--Le podcaster? C'est moi!!!! 6:11 AM Dec 10th from TweetDeck

Rich Nieset discussing@Kickfire MySQL appliance audited industry benchmarks, TPC-H, for query performance vis-a-vis Oracle/HP. #analytics 12:52 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

Rich Nieset discussing@Kickfire advanced column store in DW appliance; requires one-tenth the disk; runs on MySQL Enterprise DB #analytics 12:49 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

Rich Nieset discussing@Kickfire SQL co-processing chip's performance advantages in DW appliance #analytics 12:47 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

Rich Nieset discussing@Kickfire SQL co-processing chip's performance advantages in DW appliance #analytics 12:44 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

RT @Kickfire: @jameskobielus: Best Practice in Data Warehousing = Analytic Appliance-based approach ... like @Kickfire! #analytics 12:43 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

RT @Kickfire: @jameskobielus: Data warehouse reality check = scalability / performance, flexibility / agility, and affordability #analytics 12:43 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

RT @Kickfire: @jameskobielus Hardware acceleration becoming one of the key secrets to success in Data Warehousing #analytics 12:43 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

RT @Kickfire: @jameskobielus Ave price of Data Warehouse dropping from $200k / TB a few years ago to around $50k / TB today #analytics 12:43 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

RT @Kickfire: @jameskobielus: 75 - 80% of EDW deployments are under 10 TB, but companies need modular scalability #analytics 12:42 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

RT @Kickfire: @jameskobielus: More companies facing pressure to evolve their Data Warehouse (http://bit.ly/6pj8Ja) NOW #analytics 12:42 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

Kickfire webinar, "More Bang for Your DW Budget" #analytics : Presented mine. Rich Nieset presenting. Flattered me. I don't blush, or do I? 12:40 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

Getting ready to present Kickfire webinar, "More Bang for Your DW Budget" (http://bit.ly/6pj8Ja) at top of the hour. #analytics 11:46 AM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

Did webinar, "BI Branches Out," today, with @JeffreySchwartz , App Dev Trends. Went well. Great Q&A. Interesting interactive poll feedback. 2:10 PM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

Preparing for webinar "BI Branches Out," 2pm (est) today, with @JeffreySchwartz , App Dev Trends (http://bit.ly/6votFt ). Lots to discuss! 12:13 PM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

RT @dougmow: "Nice piece on social networking by @jameskobielus: http://bit.ly/8Osdef" JK--Thanx! Key theme that will inform my 2010 agenda 9:06 AM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

New Forrester blogpost: "Social Network Analysis: Going to Become Too Ubiquitous for Its Own Good" (http://bit.ly/5SetBh) 3:55 PM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

"James Kobielus, #Forrester, discusses new BI solutions and capabilities coming to market, Tues Dec 8, 2pm EST" (http://bit.ly/8blAjK) 9:05 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

LIFE-OF-AN-ANALYST TWEETS

@Claudia_Imhoff #BBBT: Analytics doesn't require software. Just analyst doing job: in head, back-of-envelope, on fly, via Twitter. However. 4 minutes ago from TweetDeck in reply to Claudia_Imhoff

Am I crazy, or does jet travel cause fingernails to grow faster? about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck

All analytics'd out for one day. Doing a solitary Charleston cha-cha--cha, here in my chair somewhere. about 23 hours ago from TweetDeck

Reading WSJ (http://bit.ly/6d0oSv) about Second City's 50th. I'm no actor, but everyday's a bit of improv & always something good for a laff 6:59 AM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

Proofing & correcting typos & awkward/overstuffed constructions in yesterday's blog. I tighten/tweeten/sweeten my stuff obsessively. 8:56 AM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

RT @heather_lukens: "ADT webcast page says..but it's tomorrow right?: JK--Tomorrow, all right, unless they've perfected time travel. 10:02 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

RT @rwang0 "product mktg pro prove their cred to influencers. Start w the truth!" JK--And don't be offended when we speak truth back to you! 8:22 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

CONTINUING-TO-INDULGE-IN-SOCIAL-MEDIA-ARE-CHANGING-THE-VERY-FABRIC-OF-OUR-POSTMODERN-EXISTENCE-WAIT-A-SEC-WHY-AREN’T THESE IN TECH-TWEET? TWEETS

My suggestion for total privacy on Facebook: Don't use Facebook. 6:10 AM Dec 10th from TweetDeck

Very nice, very nice. My Twitter profile streams by in a "lifestream" in my AIM client. May get me to use AIM again...for other than IM 5:36 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

"TIBCO Unveils tibbr" (http://bit.ly/93hSYx): JK--Topic-oriented pub-sub incorporating a Twitter-like followme/followyou model. GA early '10 7:41 AM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

Being asked to respond to online satisfaction surveys automatically reduces my satisifaction. Heisenberg's Principle? Hawthorne Effect? 9:57 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

"TwitterPeek: The Single-Purpose Tweeting Device" (http://bit.ly/7gn8RO): JK--Would be fine if I only tweeted. 9:54 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

Just testing this Twitter photo capabilty in TweetDeck. Some old hippie photo I had lying around (http://tweetphoto.com/6004077) 8:30 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

RT @stoweboyd: "good morning edglings!" JK--And a good morning to all you earthlings. Resistance is futile. We control your transmission. 8:25 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

Problem with computers in our lives is that they tend to mash everything--work and life--into a single cluttered field of experience. 7:49 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

MUSIC TWEETS

Listening to Rilo Kiley, "Silver Lining," from "Under the Blacklight." Doing a duet with Jenny Lewis. about 23 hours ago from TweetDeck

Listening to The Seekers, "I'll Never Find Another You," from Time-Life's "Treasury of Folk" collection. Harmonizing silently with that lady about 23 hours ago from TweetDeck

Listening to cryptic and apparently forlorn but quietly gorgeous "Re: Stacks" by Bon Iver from "For Emma, Forever Ago." Wintering 4:51 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

RT @kexpplaylist: Animal Party by King Khan & BBQ Show #KEXP: JK--One of those great new revivalist rock-n-roll bands: vintage 60s garage 7:18 AM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

RT @kexpplaylist: Svefn-G-Englar by Sigur Rós #KEXP: JK--Arctic Icelandic chiller from 2000 remains one of this decade's musical landmarks. 9:40 PM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

RT @kexpplaylist: Bamboo Banger by MIA #KEXP: JK--Good. Maya Arulpragasam credits Jonathan Richman. Opening lyrics quote his "Roadrunner" 9:01 PM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

RT @kexpplaylist #KEXP Sadagora Hot Dub by Amsterdam Klezmer Band: JK--Reminds of Liechtensteiner Polka. Dad had that on vinyl. We're Polish 8:52 PM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

RT @kexpplaylist: Dirt in the Ground (live) by Tom Waits #KEXP: JK--Tom's best "voice from the crypt." Always seems that he invites mockery 11:31 AM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

RT @kexpplaylist: Alan Parsons in a Winter Wonderland by Grandaddy #KEXP: "Digital snow, frozen pianos, electronic bands, frostbitten hands" 11:19 AM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

Speaking of The Dutchess and The Duke, also check out Arthur & Yu, a Seattle man-woman duo with similar feel. Cinematic but somehow intimate 6:52 PM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

RT @kexpplaylist: Sunrise / Sunset by The Dutchess & The Duke #KEXP: JK--This group has an Ennio Morricone-like vibe, with male/female duets 6:51 PM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

RT @kexpplaylist: Ludlow St. by Julian Casablancas #KEXP: JK--Great one. I like this guy's solo stuff better than his Strokes recordings. 2:49 PM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

RT @kexpplaylist: You Are My Joy by The Reindeer Section #KEXP: JK--Not an Xmas song. Just a joyful ode from Gary Lightbody of Snow Patrol. 1:16 PM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

Listening to k.d. lang's "The Mind of Love" from the very slinky, languid, lounge-y, French-y and aptly named "Ingenue" LP. Early 90s. 10:58 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

RT @kexpplaylist: Lucinda-Ain't Goin Down (live) by Tom Waits #KEXP: JK--Today's Tom's 60th. Bless his gnarly heart! 9:09 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

RT @TonyBaer: @NeilRaden "Mingus...ironic how he was later silenced by crippling disease." JK--Same's been said about Iron Man Gehrig. 8:57 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

RT @AlanMorrison "Has Sting mellowed? haven't we all?" JK--Dylan hasn't: same stubborn cuss as always: now an age-appropriate curmudgeon 8:37 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

RT @morefromalan "Billy joel is a pretty easy target." JK--I like some of his, but his songwriting tends toward labored crowd pleasers. 7:46 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

RT @TonyBaer "He was a kid from Hicksville (nr Levittown), Springsteen was from Jersey." JK--Didn't claim Bruce an Islander. 7:42 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

RT @kexpplaylist: To Be Young (Is To Be Sad, Is To Be High) by Dave Rawlings Machine #KEXP: JK--Great C&W version. Co-wrote with Ryan Adams 7:41 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

RT @NeilRaden "Elton & Boss have slipped into cheeseball realm" JK--Still love their recent work: Elton's filmsongs, Bruce's Seeger sessions 7:40 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

I know I may gore some sacred oxen here, but Billy Joel is pure cheeseball, IMHO. Tries to be one part Elton John, one part Springsteen. 9:30 PM Dec 6th from TweetDeck

TV TWEETS

See that PSA where teenager texting while driving? His mobile predicts likelihood of surviving imminent crash? Predictive analytics. Classic about 3 hours ago from TweetDeck

RT @NPRbackstory: (diane sawyer) For Stephanopoulos, It's Officially 'Good Morning': JK--Hmmm. Whose face is easier on the eyes? Hmmmm about 4 hours ago from TweetDeck

Graphic blandishment: animation on "A Charlie Brown Christmas." Magic process for transforming sorry saplings into Xmas tree spectaculars? 8:33 PM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

"Smothers Bros: Dangerously Funny Pair" (http://bit.ly/6stB0D): JK--Great podcast: Check out awesome clip of DSteinberg censored sermonette! 9:00 AM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

RT @markmadsen: @NeilRaden "AT&T take millions spent on Luke Wilson ads & BUY FEW MORE TOWERS" JK--Disagree. Wilson's career more important 11:15 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

TIME-MARCHES-INEXORABLY-ON TWEETS

2009: a year when global economy began painful long-term resurrection from late-2008 freak-out and worried about possibility of relapse 12:22 PM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

2009: a year when appliances deepened footprint in analytics & Oracle staked future on appliance-bsd (ie, Sun inside) "vertical integration" 12:21 PM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

2009: a year when analytics continued to branch out and mature in myriad directions: self-svc, predictive, content, real-time, cloud, etc. 12:17 PM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

GRATUITOUSLY-SENSUAL TWEETS

Sonya opened up the cookies, and I thank her for that. Had a mid-afternoon sugar jones...now satiated...for now 2:03 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

In my book, a wintry mix is any imbibulatory concoction that warms the soul--and melts your cold cold heart. 8:14 AM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

Can rejoice in this rich, full, calm near-winter air. Can ponder what mix of cold, clarity, humidity, & ionization produces it. Or do both. 12:09 PM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

HOLIDAY-MOOD TWEETS

"Black Friday Results Bode Well..." (http://bit.ly/7JQss2): JK--Bizarre phrase. Color's absence augurs season of commercial light? Change it 9:42 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

"Do You Have a Coupon for That?" (http://bit.ly/7SZenL): JK--Coupon culture takes the joy and spontaneity out of shopping. Ban 'em 9:37 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

GRATUITOUS-ERUDITION TWEETS

Love quasi-oxymoronic phrase: "exception that proves the rule." Obviously, exceptions DISPROVE rules. But "prove" has older sense of "test" 8:54 AM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

ARMCHAIR-PHILOSOPHER TWEETS

When someone labels self a "guru," I push back and head in opposite direction. Don't need prophet who stands to profit from leading me along 10:47 AM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

Half the time I think all human stress is due to trying to walk upright while trying to balance an overstuffed mind up top., 7:58 AM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

"Progress Software Underpins CERN’s Search for “God Particle”" (http://bit.ly/7UP1nR): JK--Heresy! Everybody knows the deity's a wave. 7:28 AM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

Learning how to sit in, and sink into, a chair is half the battle of sedentary life. Can be still but also poised for action. Max relaxation 9:08 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

ARTSY TWEETS

Just watching Quentin Tarantino talk tires me out. Hyper-excitable, strong element of crazy. Passionate. Saw him on Leno last night. 6:09 AM Dec 10th from TweetDeck

Revelation! Absolutely love Currier & Ives' contemporary lithographs of mid-19th century America. Peace & commerce. Not a hint of Civil War 10:26 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck

RT @markmadsen: "he doesn't seem to be doing as well" JK--Yep: Luke's a lukewarm alternative to Owen, who's second-best to Ben Stiller 4:52 PM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

STRAY PERSONAL TWEETS

Good friends know they can count on Jimmy for a quick mojo infusion. Sometimes it's a 2-way intravenous proposition. 'SWotFriendsR4! 12:03 PM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

Inscription: "Halloween. NAIM. 10/70." NAIM was Catholic Widows & Widowers social group. Detroit. http://tweetphoto.com/6004077 11:47 AM Dec 7th from TweetPhoto

BTW, you'd be excused for thinking this me behind the shades and fake'stache. Guess who I resemble. http://tweetphoto.com/6004077 11:45 AM Dec 7th from TweetPhoto

Jan Coburn and Bill Kobielus, 1970. Party outfits. Dad was 46 then, a year after Mom passed away. http://tweetphoto.com/6004077 11:43 AM Dec 7th from TweetPhoto

STRAY POLITICAL TWEETS

So Obama accepted Nobel Peace Prize, discussed war he's escalating, used "just war" rationale. Hinted at war as alternative to unjust peace. 8 minutes ago from TweetDeck

"Will US Supreme Court overhaul Sarbanes-Oxley?" (http://bit.ly/8RHHJU): JK--"SarbOx": already feels like response to '00s trivia quiz. about 6 hours ago from TweetDeck

Cloud manifesto. SOA manifesto. Communist manifesto. Enough manifestos already. Kaczynski had manifesto. Not a credit to my people, BTW. 8:55 PM Dec 8th from TweetDeck

Karl Rove in WSJ says Obama can win in Afghanistan. Let me get this straight, someone in Republican camp wants this president to succeed? 10:30 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

"Painful Social Media Foray for Seattle Journalists" (http://bit.ly/65rUAe): JK--Twtr r-t p2p CEP? BTW, is Clemmons Huckabee's Horton? 10:21 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

STRAY SCIENCE TWEETS

WSJ article on permafrost melt in Fairbanks--city of 100,000--causing buildings to sink. Surprised subarctic can support city that large. 8:16 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

At what point does ALS' aka transition to "Stephen Hawking's Disease"? 9:33 PM Dec 6th from TweetDeck

RT @computerworld: "A solar storm in 2013 could trigger a giant power outage -- or not. http://bit.ly/4NDhwg" JK--Apocalypse now!--or not. 8:23 AM Dec 7th from TweetDeck

FLIPPING-OUT TWEETS

Flipped! Flipping out! Those who recall Flipper the TV show, the pinball game, and hardcore punk band will know what I'm talking about. Not about 22 hours ago from TweetDeck

Discussed the complex calculations behind a true man's strategic decision to drop the f-bomb to avoid long drawn out battle in war of words about 23 hours ago from TweetDeck

Worked the word "synoptics" organically into the conversation today. about 23 hours ago from TweetDeck

RT @jowyang @queenrania impressive leader...Excellent, inspiring, touching: JK--BTW check out funny Jordan entry in Onion's "Our Dumb World" 6:17 AM Dec 10th from TweetDeck

Would be ironic if we discovered Pluto has a core of solid plutonium. 4:54 PM Dec 9th from TweetDeck