Big data and analysis, SEO ruining America, software complexity and “going with the flow” as part of the Laws of Thermodynamics.

Big data requires big analysis

Last week I interviewed GE Intelligent Platforms Business Leader for Software, Erik Udstuen, about what was happening lately. He talked about leveraging the company’s historian and analysis tools in the service of asset excellence.

As a bonus, here is a podcast from IT Conversations discussing big data and analysis. From the Website, “Did you know California’s entire research network of educational institutions, kindergarten through college, now empties directly into Amazon’s cloud storage system? From data generated by thousands of Web 2.0 companies every second to terabytes of data generated by government at every level; this may be the golden age of data set collection. In this presentation Werner Vogels defines Big Data, examines the challenges that big data creates, and invites everyone to consider the types of innovation necessary to handle them.”

Pizza tastes better than broccoli

For years I pondered how to make money writing, and then Jane Gerold, then at Control Engineering, introduced me to business-to-business (B2B) publications. So, now I’m a writer but also involved deeply in publishing. And make a nice living doing it. I was a Web person before I was a print person, so I really watch the Web space. One of the biggest ideas of the past 8 years or so has been Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Recently someone leaked an AOL (Huffington Post) memo about the “AOL Way” where editors were instructed to only write articles relating to terms or information that provoked the greatest number of clicks per Google. In other words, don’t write things that will provide new information and get readers to think–rather write short things that reinforce opinions already held.

For your listening pleasure, another IT Conversations podcast “Is SEO Killing America?” From the Website, “Does pizza taste better than broccoli? If you’re like most people, you’re going to answer pizza. It should come as no surprise then, that many health experts point to our preference for unhealthy food as a leading cause for the obesity problem in the United States. Clay Johnson suggests that a similar trend is happening in the way we consume content. In this keynote, Clay illustrates how our web preferences are impacting the type of content media companies produce and what we can do to combat our information over-consumption.”

Software complexity

Did you miss the significance buried in the Invensys/Microsoft announcement that I wrote about here? Microsoft is helping Invensys write the code to move some of its software to the Azure cloud.

The significance is that software is complex. It is not easily ported. For years, I talked with executives who said they would integrate software from an acquisition easily because “both are built with .Net; both use object oriented programming; and both use Service Oriented Architecture. However, software is more complicated than that. One person’s objects aren’t necessarily another’s. Same with a services bus. I’ve seen much overpromise and underdeliver. So this approach by Invensys and Microsoft is intriguing.

Special Bonus Thought–Going with the flow

In Yoga, we often talk of going with the flow. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi wrote a book on Flow–the psychology of optimal experience. Now, this <a href=”http://itc.conversationsnetwork.org/shows/detail5202.html”<podcast of TechNation with Dr. Moira Gunn, who learns more about the perspective of flows from Duke professor Adrian Bejan, author of Design in Nature. We learn that flow is blessed by the laws of thermodynamics.

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