The Information Firehose - and Data Analytics

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The amount of data that is streaming into - and out of - our lives is ramping up geometrically, and there doesnt seem to be an end in sight.  Matthew Ingram has a nice article on the unfriending effects associated with this firehose
I think this is a feeling we probably all have now and then, thanks to what some call information overload andClay Shirky has called “filter failure.” Maybe we feel it when our inbox is filled with messages that have been sent by someone clicking “reply all,” or maybe when we get inundated with Facebook messages and photo tags, or — on the far end of the spectrum — when we try to follow someone like Robert Scoble on a new social network like Google+. The uber-blogger and social-media maven described recently how his own wife deleted her Google+ accountbecause of the signal-to-noise problem caused in part by Scoble himself.
Speaking for myself, my time is increasingly becoming one of my most valued and treasured resources. Where I bestow it is becoming all-important, I don't have the time to track everybody and everything.  BigData is clearly part of the answer here - if this isn't a textbook example of Volume, Velocity, and Variety, I don't know what is.  Its a ton of data, its changing all the time, and it comes in all sorts of flavors.

Repeat after me - Data Analytics is in all our futures.  Mind you, I'm not talking about complex Business Intelligent systems.  I'm referring to tools that can be used to make sense of this data, things like Siri that actually *use* BI to figure out what you actually asked.
Interesting times...

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