I am Joining Forrester
On 17 December, 2008, I published a blog post to announce that I was leaving Talis and setting out as an independent Analyst and Consultant. Today, everything changes once more: I am in London, about to start my first day as Senior Analyst at Forrester Research, opining on all things cloudy within Forrester’s CIO-serving team....
On Forbes
I started writing for Forbes this week, and should be posting there reasonably regularly. I’ll be writing about similar topics to those I cover here, including cloud computing, big data, and points in between. You can follow along here, and subscribe to the RSS feed here.
Remembering Gigaom Research
As I’m sure most readers of this blog already know, tech media company Gigaom shut its doors earlier this week. Stalwarts of Gigaom’s public-facing news site such as Stacey Higginbotham, Derrick Harris, and founder Om Malik have already offered personal perspectives on their own sites, and I expect others to follow in due course as they...
Conflict of Interest: common sense or witch-hunt?
People in this business get quite worked up about the conflicts of interest faced by ‘influencers’; analysts, prominent bloggers, and the rest. That concern is understandable and reasonable. We do need to know when the advice, guidance and opinion we’re being given is influenced by external factors (both positive and negative). But the vehemence with which a very...
Three days in Yorkshire
Unusually for me, I’ve found myself at reasonably local events over the past few days. Leeds last Wednesday to hear people discuss big data, York last Friday to talk about open data, and Hull today to check out the city’s impressive new work space. It’s easy to look beyond the local environment, and to assume...
This is the news… today
I recently set up a new Tumblr site, in addition to my main blog here at cloudofdata.com. It’s been running for a few days now, and I’m deliberately posting just one entry each day to explore a topical news item, issue, or trend. We are all inundated by a constant stream of press releases, tweets,...
GigaOM Pro report on Hadoop and cluster management
My latest piece of work for GigaOM Pro just went live. Scaling Hadoop clusters: the role of cluster management is available to GigaOM Pro subscribers, and was underwritten by StackIQ. Thanks to everyone who took the time to speak with me during the preparation of this report. As the blurb describes, From Facebook to Johns...
A new host, a new design
As visitors to the Cloud of Data site have probably spotted, it’s got a new design today. Under the hood it’s also moved to a new hosting company, and the team at ZippyKid have been very helpful during the transition. We’re still on WordPress, and everything appears to be working as it should, but I’ll...
CloudCamp reaches Leeds on 14 June
The global CloudCamp movement continues to grow, with events over the next few weeks in Denmark, Germany, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, and across the United States. And now, I’m very pleased to announce that the English city of Leeds is joining the party. CloudCamp events have been taking place in the UK for years, and the...
Shock result in podcast poll suggests The Buggles were wrong and Queen were right!
Way back in 1979, before YouTube’s three founders could either walk or talk, The Buggles claimed that “Video Killed the Radio Star.” Queen countered in 1984 with Radio Ga Ga, in which Freddie Mercury sang (of radio); We watch the shows, we watch the stars On videos for hours and hours We hardly need to use our...
A conversation with Richard Wallis, an experiment, and a survey
Richard Wallis left Talis (my former employer) last month, and has set up as a consultant at DataLiberate. In this short podcast, Richard shares some of his thoughts on data, semantics, and ‘the power of the link.’ Our conversation is also an excuse for an experiment. I have been producing audio-only podcasts here and elsewhere...
Which is better? NO information or the WRONG information?
No system is perfect, and no affordable system can be engineered to be wholly tolerant of every fault and hiccup that might come its way. That’s why we have procedures in place to cope when things go wrong. One important part of those procedures should surely be effective communication with customers, (especially?) when they’re paying...
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