In her recent post "Bid Data? Big Deal" LoveStats rightfully pokes fun at the term "big data" that became a new buzzword of social media folks. As she correctly points out, there is nothing special or new about big data sets; they have been around since Census data became available in digital format. Unfortunately, more than often this fascination tends to be with the size and "messiness" of such data, and rarely with their content and potential value. True, so many businesses and organizations now have accumulated thousands and millions of data points on their customers, staff, etc. It is also true, most of them have no clue what to do with this information. The common notion is that these untouched "gold mines" are just waiting to be ..yes, mined (as in data mining). However, most of the time when the term "big data" is mentioned, the main emphasis is usually on data organization and management (how to restructure that data and keep it up to date) and rarely on extracting insights and analytics. It's all about storing (cloud! cloud!!), restructuring, and visualizing (dashboards!!!!).
And that makes me a sad, sad panda...
