I had a difficult decision this month. There are two terms being thrown around conference rooms with the same mind-boggling frequency as "hit the ground running" and "make sure we are on the same page."  The funny thing about these new buzzwords is that they are really technology terms but they have been embraced by business folks who believe they are "thinking outside the box."  So I had a tough decision to make. Should I write about HTML 5—as in "our new website needs to be HTML 5," or should I discuss "Big Data," as in, "Big Data is going to fundamentally change the way we do business?" Big data won this month but with HTML 5 displacing Web 2.0 as a "value-added paradigm" it was a tough decision.

What is Big Data in real life? Generally accepted definitions are something like this: data sets that are so large and complex they cannot easily be processed or analyzed by traditional database tools. That doesn't really tell us a lot. There are new tools that allow us to manage large amounts of data through distributed non-traditional methods. And that is very interesting to a technologist.

But the technology is not really what most people are referring to when they talk about big data. What has caught everyone's attention is the unprecedented amount of data that is now being collected and stored. One estimate put the monthly Internet data flow at over 20 exabytes (an exabyte is 1,000,000 terabytes). We are collecting data at such a rate that we often have no practical methods in place to analyze and make use of that data.