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Synced Video of Harvey Danger Song

It's Friday. I enjoyed this video. You might enjoy it too. Particularly after about a minute. It's the type of thing that I miss about working in the bay area startups and young companies.

Lip Dub - Flagpole Sitta by Harvey Danger from amandalynferri and Vimeo.

Posted by Mark Friday, June 29, 2007 3:42:00 PM | permalink | (2) comments

Powerset Gives Natural Language Dead Horse Another Beating

I was going to write about Powerset, a search startup / hype machine that keeps generating buzz without delivering anything, but Donna Bogatin delivered far better than I could with this post on their supposed coming out of stealth mode. I keep tabs on search because it's one piece of the information management puzzle, but in enterprise situations it's highly overrated and far more difficult to implement, despite all the "BI & search" hype.

Powerset hyped NL search queries, and now they seem to be hyping web 2.0 search. I'm one of those people who doesn't really believe NL search is that great a thing, for a lot of reasons I won't go into. But the mutating Powerset pitches and buzz marketing leave me clenching my teeth. I'm glad Insider Chatter was there to do the work for me. It's moved up on my weekly reading list. Here's her take on Google.

"The Google $160 billion plus market cap business plan is to CONTROL all the world’s information AND all the personal data of ALL the world’s citizens with the goals of:
1) selling high-priced advertisements against the content owned by others, and
2) data mining the personal information of others for its own corporate advantage."

Good take on Google's constant drumming of the "we're not so evil" mantra while they continue to slide into evil. Curmudgeonly. I like it.

Labels: Google, Powerset, search

Posted by Mark 2:51:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

Slides for the ETL Market Update

These are the slides from the ETL market overview webcast I did for TDWI in May. Share and enjoy.

If the small fonts are hard to read you can go to the slideshare site (link on the lower right) where you can see a full-screen version of these presentations.
The replay of the webcast is now available at the TDWI website.

Labels: data integration, etl, market

Posted by Mark Wednesday, June 27, 2007 6:01:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

Slides for Hand-coding ETL Available

I'm trying something different with the slides for this TDWI ETL webcast, using slideshare instead of the usual PDF and embedding it directly. I will convert and post a PDF later as I've done with all the other webcasts later. The downside of Slideshare is that the transcript doesn't contain the information from the notes pages, which makes presentations like this less useful.



Update: the replay of the webcast is now available at the TDWI website.

Labels: business intelligence, etl, extract, hand-coding

Posted by Mark Tuesday, June 26, 2007 5:06:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

Navy OKs Open Source

On June 5 the Navy gave the stamp of approval to open source software as an option for their contracts. This is a big deal since government procurement has all sorts of complicated requirements, and you have to be included in that process to get in the door. This paves the way for other government agencies to follow suit.

"Open-source software is now an official option for all information technology systems in the Navy and Marine Corps, according to a guidance memo issued June 5 by the Department of the Navy’s Office of the Chief Information Officer."

Good news for open source providers, as well as systems integrators. For the SIs, it means they can take a larger portion of the project budget for services, rather than having that money go to software partners. The question is whether they will pick up on that, given that they sometimes resell software and other times the software vendors get them into projects. It's a conflicted world out there.

Labels: government, open source

Posted by Mark Thursday, June 21, 2007 12:59:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments

How to Tell a Story With Data

This is a great lecture by Hans Rosling, interesting and communicative visualizations, and he really knows how to show the story in the data. It's only 20 minutes and worth your time on two levels - learning something new and seeing someone good at presenting information.



You can play with some the tools he's using in his presentation at the gapminder site, as well as looking at the interactive 2005 development trends report I blogged about back then.

Labels: visualization

Posted by Mark Thursday, June 14, 2007 8:05:00 PM | permalink | (0) comments