Editor’s Choices for Week Ending Jul 20, 2012

Article of the Week
BI is Dead! Long Live BI! (SmartData Collective)
Big Idea: Raden suggests a dozen best practices to move  Business Intelligence (BI) into the next century and argues the real innovation in BI is coming from smaller companies.

Editor’s Choice Articles
9 Metrics to Measure Social Media Success (Stephen Moore, Evergreen Search Blog)
Big Idea: It’s easy to measure certain metrics – followers, friends, fans, subscribers, blog posts, – but you also need to measure what happens after these early steps are taken.  This article provides nine metrics used to measure social media success.

What’s The Difference Between Data Scientists and Rocket Scientists? (Mike Kennedy, SmartData Collective)
Big Idea: There’s an important nuance about the community of analytics professionals focused on hard sciences and engineering versus those focused on business: businesses, organizations, and markets all involve interactions between people.

Your Laptop Can Now Analyze Big Data (John Pavlus, MIT Technology Review)
Big Idea: Computer scientists from Carnegie Mellon University have devised a framework for running large-scale computations for tasks such as social network or Web search analysis efficiently on a single personal computer.

What You Need To Know About Hortonworks, Splunk, and 28 Other Big Data Companies (Dave Feinleib, Forbes)
Big Idea: A snapshot of industry trends based on interviews with 30 companies in 30 days, focused on Big Data “Haves” and “Have Nots.”

Better medicine, brought to you by big data (Derrick Harris, SmartData Collective)
Big Idea: Slowly but surely, health care is becoming a killer app for big data. Whether it’s Hadoop, machine learning, natural-language processing or some other technique, folks in the worlds of medicine and hospital administration understand that new types of data analysis are the key to helping them take their fields to the next level.