Big Data And The Internet Of Things are all the rage, to such an extent they have become anything people want them to mean - they are becoming Smurfs of the technology lexicon.
I feel their pain. Science 2.0 went through that period. Two years after Science 2.0 started, a Science 1.0 site printed an article by a computer scientist claiming Science 2.0 was networking theory - and Science 2.0's Wikipedia entry is hacked up so much it's a good thing that it is not the first entry for Science 2.0 in Google search, or people would think it was invented by Wired in 2012 or that it is an offshoot of Open Science, which wasn't even created when Science 2.0 started.
There's no way to fix Wikipedia, the miscreants outweigh the credible people. All we can do is talk about what Science 2.0 isn't (almost everything on the Wikipedia page; I don't link to it because Google weirdly gives them more authority if people link to them) and that is all that will work for Big Data also.
Vishal Kumar in Analytics Week did what he could in January to dispel some of the mistaken beliefs and irrational optimism - not that it will do any good as long as there are marketing people out there who can sell something to make money on the latest buzzword.
Some things are obvious, like there is no such thing as a Data Scientist. Like SEO Expert, your bullshit meter should go right to 9 when someone claims you need them to understand your data. Likewise, it's also not wise to assume Big Data is just hype. It's real, and it's here to stay and you are doing yourself a disservice if you don't take advantage of it. No one has the opportunity to optimize and utilize user data like airlines, for example, but anyone can see they are clearly trapped in 1999.
In 10 Misconceptions about Big Data, he only gets one thing wrong - that it is not only for big companies. If you are at a small company and someone tells you worrying about Big Data will be an advantage, just fire them and let them go work at Facebook.
