Greenplum et alia’s BigDataNews.com site
Greenplum recently started a website BigDataNews.com, and quickly signed up Aster Data as a co-sponsor. (Edit: As per a comment below, the decision to sign up additional sponsors was made by the site’s independent publisher.) It’s actually being run by Brett Sheppard, a former Gartner/DataQuest analyst who now gets involved in this kind of thing. (Brett and I may be working on another project soon, with Greenplum funding.)
The heart of the site is feeds* from a variety of high-profile blogs (DBMS2, Daniel Abadi’s, Joe Hellerstein’s, James Kobelius’, et al.), plus some additional posts written by Brett (primarily) or Greenplum folks. Highlights of Brett’s posts include:
- What I am told was an unauthorized revelation that Greenplum Chorus is built on CouchDB and Erlang.
- An impassioned defense of the integrity of Gartner’s analysis.
*At least in my case, that’s just a post title or snippet, plus a link back to the main post. The same goes for mapreduce.org, actually.
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2 Responses to “Greenplum et alia’s BigDataNews.com site”
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Hi. My name is Tim Matteson and I am the publisher of Big Data News. We are in the beginning stages of building this website around the topic of Big Data. We are really excited to have you and other industry experts as guest or syndicated bloggers. In your post you identify bigdatanews.com as Greenplum’s website. I thought it worth mentioning to you that the site is not Greenplum’s. It is certainly true that that they got us started, but we are working hard to include additional sponsors, such as Aster Data, Vertica, Cloudera, and others.
Hi Curt,
Thanks again for your article about Big Data News. And thanks for including the Edit note from Big Data News’ publisher; while the timing of when I came onboard Big Data News as a freelance editor was after the site URL and basic site plans were already set up, it’s my understanding that the publisher (Tim Matteson and his company), and not a specific sponsor, started the website and began soliciting sponsors, of whom Greenplum and Aster Data were the first two to join, with additional companies expressing interest in sponsorships or advertising.
Regarding your note about CouchDB, thanks for forwarding the email background from Greenplum’s head of product management. The VP of business development at CouchDB-specialist Couchio appeared and was quoted in Greenplum’s “teaser video” released publicly several weeks prior to the Gartner BI Summit and Greenplum Days events. And following Big Data News’ standard editorial practice (used for sponsors and non-sponsors alike), we sent Greenplum’s VP of marketing a pre-release copy of that article, with a request to check for errors or non-public information. This is similar to Wired magazine’s approach (at least as of the last time Wired magazine quoted me for one of their articles), where there is a pre-release fact-check process that checks for basic corrections or deletions of non-public information, but does not allow a specific vendor or individual to dictate editorial coverage. Greenplum’s VP of marketing replied to the pre-release fact-check email with a “good article” reply, with no mention of any non-public information that should be deleted. Accordingly, with both the editorial process steps and CouchDB/Couchio’s inclusion in the public video published several weeks prior to that article, I don’t see an “unauthorized revelation that Greenplum Chorus is built on CouchDB and Erlang.” Or if there was one, it was inadvertent, and was something that Greenplum had the opportunity to fix prior to publishing.
Incidentally, the same fact-check process applies to non-sponsors too: when I talked yesterday with Netezza (which to date has not been a sponsor) for an upcoming article next week on in-database analytics, I explained the same fact-check process.
I’ve been very pleased with the diversity of opinions and range of industry thought leaders represented on Big Data News, including your excellent DBMS2 posts. For my own schedule, I have one more week onboard Big Data News as a part-time editor to finish helping the site’s editorial content get under way, before I transition back to my regular focus as a full-time product / solutions marketer. The Big Data News community is growing well and shows good potential, with a good range of content on Big Data topics from diverse perspectives including RDBMS, column stores, Hadoop/MapReduce, Cassandra and other “NoSQL” choices, memchached, BI program best practices, etc.
Best regards,
Brett