INSITE Previewed in Inside Tucson Business
New University of Arizona institute to mine data deposit for private sector companies.
By Patrick McNamara, Inside Tucson Business, February 17, 2012"The explosion of social media in recent years has left the digital landscape strewn with data.
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| Photo courtesy of J.D. Fitzgerald |
But more than mere rubble, the information hidden in the data could prove a goldmine for many businesses, according to Sudha Ram, University of Arizona McClelland Professor of management information systems at the Eller College of Management.
"Really what social media is giving us is not the ability to network with friends, it's giving us large amounts of data to mine," Ram said.
Ram is one of the creative forces behind INSITE, Center for Business Intelligence and Analytics.
The idea behind INSITE is to help businesses make sound decisions based on the digital information around them and provide business clients with the knowledge to monetize social media.
To better understand how Ram and her colleagues plan to do that, some explanation of social media is appropriate.
The term generally refers to the second generation of the internet that has facilitated greater user interaction and participation.
In its initial iteration, the Web was largely a passive media where users looked at or read material that others put online. In today's Web world, users have become participants, interacting with and contributing to online content, often as a matter of course.
The universe of social media includes the most rudimentary online message boards, to news site comments pages to the now ubiquitous Facebook and twitter.
"We're in a paradigm shift because there are all these sources of data," Ram said.
In fact, the amount of data web users deposit each day is enough to fill the world's libraries multiple times.
In 2010, Google CEO Eric Schmidt estimated that as much data is generated over a standard two-day span now as was created from the dawn of mankind to the year 2003.
Google alone produces more than 20 petabytes of data every day. Roughly translated, one petabyte is the equivalent of 250 billion pages of text." Read the full article here.
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