I’m happy to be in the Editor in Chief of the Journal of Big Data, a new peer-reviewed publication offering an integrative approach to the subject of big data.

In advance of the publication of our first issue in February 2013, I wanted to outline why Big Data exists, and why I believe it’s important this journal be published open access.

As a discipline, big data is broad. It brings in diverse topics from areas such as database design, machine learning, statistics, visualization, social media, policy, privacy and ethics. All these things come together to underpin the work being done by today’s data-centric organizations.

Hitherto, all these areas have their own journals and conferences, and different academic communities. By bringing the areas together, I hope to foster dialogue between the various technical and user communities. For example, issues such as fine-grained user control over privacy will require engineering at the database level to efficiently accomplish.

Secondly, in big data there is a short cycle from R&D to production. In fact, many of the influential papers in the field, such as Google’s MapReduce paper, were published after the work described had been running in production for some time. This underlines that a successful forum for the area must draw together industrial and research contributions, and take a pragmatic hands-on approach. Method, professional and industrial experience are as important as results.

A similar model in my mind as I edit the journal is the Communications of the ACM, which melds experience with research articles.

Open access

The journal of Big Data will publish all peer-reviewed articles of original research as open access, and license the content under Creative Commons “CC-BY” license. 

In addition to philosophical reasons, I believe open access publication is important for this journal in order to:

• ensuring widest possible distribution — to be integrative over industry, we must recognize that many readers won’t have subscriptions to journals as academic institutions do: advance in big data is coming from all quarters
• ensuring broad & timely publication — any journal in computing has to compete with the conference-paper route taken by many academics. We will publish and make papers available online as soon as they are accepted. For an integrative approach, this is superior to the siloed model that conferences facilitate.

Additionally, Big Data does not impose article processing fees on the author, though obviously it costs the journal to peer review, edit and prepare articles for publication.

Instead, the journal publishers intend to make money in two ways:

• in addition to peer-reviewed content, we are publishing additional content of high quality and interest to readers, which is only available via subscription. So subscribers help underwrite the open access publishing costs and are rewarded with exclusive content;
• secondly, as the journal, its contents, and much of the research work in big data is valuable to commerce, we are recruiting sponsorship from companies to support the journal, which will naturally garner them exposure to the readership. Many big data companies have benefited from the free publication of research and development of open source software, I hope they will take a lead in supporting its continuation and the existence of a viable integrated forum for big data.

How you can contribute

On behalf of myself and the Big Data editorial board, I invite you to join the wider dialogue on big data. 

If you have an original article you wish to submit to the peer review process for publication, please refer to the submission guidelines.

If you wish to discuss content for the subscriber magazine side of the journal, feel free to email me to discuss.

Also, please get in touch with me or the publisher if you want to sponsor the journal or commission custom content.

The first issue of the Journal will be published mid-February, in time for Strata 2013. In the meantime, please enjoy the free preview issue, available for download from the journal’s home page.

(Footnote: as confusion might understandably arise, although I am employed by O’Reilly Media, the publisher of this journal is Mary Ann Liebert.)

It’s the first working day of the New Year. Armed with resolutions to be more organized, many of us are sprucing up our obligations in to-do list managers. This is great. But don’t mistake checking things off a list for doing meaningful things.

I use the wonderful Todoist for managing my lists of things to do, but I was disturbed to see that it listed my report card of items completed listed as “productivity”. They’re not the same thing.

How you view your to-do list, or other self-management method, is vital. If you view it in the wrong way, resentment grows, and it stops being a tool and becomes more of a jailer. And ultimately, you give it up and there goes another good resolution!

Here are some traps with to-do lists:

• To-do lists can rapidly become “haven’t done” lists and a source of guilt. Between when you write things down and when real life happens, priorities change. Prune your lists and accept that everything changes.
• It’s hard to itemize creativity and deep thought. Not all tasks are created equal. Lists can be very suited to shallow work, but not the things that really make you feel productive.
• It’s easy to put yourself last. When writing a list, what tends to come to mind is a list of obligations you have to others. Before long, you resent your lists and probably stop using them. Don’t let other people drive your day: turn it around and use a to-do list as a tool of your own agency. This is why it’s a great idea to drive your day from your list, not your email inbox. It puts you in control of what goes in there.

Perhaps the best formulation I’ve seen of “productivity” methods is that they’re a tool for managing attention. Remember that tools should work for us, not the other way around!

My writeup for O’Reilly Radar of the Save Publishing bookmarklet.

My first blog post on Forbes, about the hype surrounding big data.

Elegant project from Paul Ford. A bookmarklet that finds tweetable sentences on a page and lets you, well, tweet them.

explore-blog:

The birth of emoticons, one of 100 diagrams that changed the world: Emoticons made a discreet entrance, arriving in print for the first time in this March 30, 1881 issue of Puck magazine. The small item in the middle of this page gives four examples of ‘typographical art’ – joy, melancholy, indifference, and astonishment.

When I’m busy traveling, I never have time to check in on any app. When I’m in a quieter period, I’m never anywhere interesting.

This is why Foursquare was perfectly placed to start in New York, where even the mundane duties of life take you to multiple places in any day.

Here’s a few articles I might get around to reading before 2013. As usual, I’m thinking about focus and attention, and naturally, forward to another year ahead.

Winter sun at O’Reilly’s campus in California

Attention and productivity

“Practices like these have been coined ‘declaring bankruptcy’ by the digital lifestyle blogs, but I think the phrase misrepresents the practice. Cleaning the digital slate is not a practice of giving up. It is one of self-forgiveness.”
Digital Jubilee

“Recently I’ve read a few new articles about scaling back from Twitter and RSS. This is a common theme, especially amongst the group of bloggers I follow. And I’m glad that it’s a common theme because things like scaling back, clarifying our goals, identifying distractions, and the like are all moving targets.”
Inbox Intentions

“The company that is ‘distributed’ means that it’s scattered across different locations, and everyone works wherever they are. As someone who’s pretty much always had a normal desk job, the transition was pretty rough on me. It’s now been almost three months, and this new gig has completely changed the way I work, and for the better”
What It’s Like To Work, Future-Style

And a couple more pieces on distraction, switching off: 7 ways to change your relationship to distractions, Put The Gadgets Down: Finding Time To Leave Technology Behind.

On the future

“Taleb asserts that the present has changed little from the past; that ‘futurists always get it wrong’, and that if we wish to envision the future we should subtract from the present things which do not belong. I believe the present is so different from the past that it would be shocking to humans from even a few centuries ago. Technology is culture, and our immersion in culture makes it quite difficult to understand just how unusual we are.”
The present will not be recognizable 

“It may be hard to believe, but before the end of this century, 70 percent of today’s occupations will likewise be replaced by automation. Yes, dear reader, even you will have your job taken away by machines. In other words, robot replacement is just a matter of time.”
Better Than Human