On two years of the event processing thinking blog

These three pictures are taken from the posting : On unicorn, professor and infant, which is, by far, the most read posting on this Blog. Today is August 28, exactly two years since I started my first posting - this is posting number 314 (PI * 100)

• Event processing technology is still a "child" (maybe no more infant), in the the life-cycle of technologies. It is moving to the youth stage, but have not achieved maturity. It still has challenges in standardization, interoperability with the rest of the universe, engineering and optimization issues, and consumability.
  
• Event processing is not a unicorn, it is not mythological but real, and it has more than one horn, it is not strongly associated with a single application, as some people tended to believe in the past. Each technology has its early adopters, but we see now that the utilization of event processing is pervasive for each industry, no less than technologies like databases, web services and workflows.
  
• The blind people touching an elephant and describing it in a different way is still an excellent metaphor. People have come from multiple perspectives and see the world in a different ways. Our challenge is to get a good understanding of the entire elephant, and overcome this syndrome. This is the mission of the Dagstuhl seminar in 2010.
  

While the unicorn and infant posting was by far the most popular - other popular postings were some postings from 2007 entitled: On event stream processing in which I have written first time that the ESP term has virtually died, and Agnon, the dog, playing and downplaying,
which responded to the claim that I am downplaying the role of rules. Among the 2009 postings the most popular was the one about the event processing language analysis workgroup,


Some more current statistics.

• The number of distinct readers is around 35,000 over these two years, however, many of them are just one-time browsers, the loyal readers, which consist of those who entered the site at least 101 times, their number is around 2,000, if we'll add more than 1,000 more who entered the site between 51-100 times, and another 1,000 who visited between 26-50 times, I would say that there are around 2,000 loyal readers, and around 2,000 more occasional readers - not big numbers in the Internet scale, but fair enough for a Blog focused on a narrow area with a developing community.
  
• The countries with most readers are: USA (still more than 50% of the readers), UK, Germany, Canada, France, India, Australia, Holland, Sweden and Spain. Israel and Japan have many entries, but less readers, which say concentration of loyal readers.
• The biggest referring source, no surprise is Google, other big reference sources are: the TIBCO blog, David Luckham's CEP site, Marco's rulecore Blog, and ebizQ.net.
  

The Blog has been cited by the CEP Knol and has become a major reason for the fact that I was approached by a publisher to write a book.

The other Blogs of the community are either company's Blog - like the TIBCO, Aleri, Streambase and Apama Blogs which express the company's view; or those of independent people or professional bloggers. While I work for IBM, I have never made it as an IBM marketing Blog, but a personal one. I have never been asked by anybody in IBM to write or not to write about anything, and although as IBM employee I do have some restrictions, I have taken upon myself more restrictions as the EPTS chair, among them the restriction of not to write evaluations about products; I am leaving this task to others; the only time that I was asked to revise a posting was fairly recently, when I cited the Gartner Enterprise Architecture Hype Cycle report, where I was asked by Gartner to make clear distinction between what I am citing from Gartner, and what are my own opinions, so I have revised it and restructured the posting in a way the distinction between them will be clear.

Sometimes new topics emerge, and sometime topics are repeating discussions, but never a dull moment in Blogland. Will return with a professional posting s00n.