New "big data" book in the works from Manning Press

I received an email this morning from Manning Press announcing an early access edition of their upcoming book "Big Data."

"Big Data" is by Nathan Marz and Sam Ritchie, both engineers at a little startup called "Twitter" of which you may have heard. The book is a survey of the practical aspects of implementing a Big Data solution. As an early access edition, currently only the first chapter is written (and freely available at
http://www.manning.com/marz/). However, promised chapters with titles like "MapReduce and Batch Processing" will cover topics like Hadoop installations,NoSQL databases, and the like.

For the uninitiated, early access editions (MEAPs or
"Manning Early Access Program" in Manning parlance) allow you to purchase
the book before it is entirely written. The purchaser is granted access to
each chapter as soon as it is completed. For more information on MEAPs,
see http://www.manning.com/about/meap.html#meapfaq.

David Weinberger Big Data excerpt in The Atlantic

David Weinberger, a Senior Researcher at Harvard University’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, has authored a new book titled "Too Big To Know." The book is concerned with how the size of data affects the way in which we use it to forge new understanding.

The Atlantic has published an excerpt here:

http://m.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/to-know-but-not-understand-david-weinberger-on-science-and-big-data/250820/

Apps For Library Idea Challenge

Sciverse is hosting an "Apps for Library Idea Challenge," in which 10 app ideas suggested by librarians are voted on in order to determine the most popular entry.

There are some good ideas here. Right now the most popular idea is "JTOCs to go," a mobile app for journal tables of contents including authorization links to enable full text access.

Check out the list of entries here:

http://www.appsforlibrary.com/entries/

Amazon's new tablet

This morning Amazon introduced their competitor for the iPad: the Kindle Fire, a touch screen app that leverages Amazon's extensive content and strength in cloud computing.

To check it out, click here.

E book treasures at the British Library

The British Library announced the first few titles in their eBook treasures series last week. The series will make available rare manuscripts which were previously only accessible to scholars, or to the public under glass.

First up is Leonardo da Vinci's Codex Arundel, a series of drawings and notes the artist made mostly concerning mechanics and geometry.

The eBooks are not free; prices listed on the eBook Treasures web site are in British pounds.

Nice overview of big data, with pretty picture

In an article this week on ZDNet.com, Dion Hinchcliffe provides a nice overview of Big Data. There's also a nice graphic included with the article, which gives a pretty good visual breakdown of where all the pieces you've heard about (Hadoop, etc) fit in.

Here's the link:

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/hinchcliffe/the-enterprise-opportunity-of-big-data-closing-the-clue-gap/1648

How different are Google and Bing?

Nice comparison of Google and Bing in the New York Times this past week:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/07/30/technology/bing-versus-google.html