Real time insights, the real-timer and the blog

I have not written in this Blog for a while, but am returning now to Blogging (I have been quite active in micro-blogging on Facebook and Twitter, though)..

Actually I am now into three types of Blogging.



The first one is this Blog: it will always be my "home" personal Blog, and in which I'll continue to write personal posts, and provide links to the other blog that I am writing about now the "real-timer".

A couple of years ago we started an Internet magazine called "RTInsights" and published a couple of issues on pilot basis.   Now we are back at RTInsights, in a new form as a website described as follows:

"RTInsights is an independent expert-driven web resource singularly focused on helping senior business and IT professionals accelerate their business with real-time insights. 
RTInsights provides a forum for business, IT and research professionals to learn from other people's experiences, glean insights from independent expert opinions, discover new developments, and follow relevant industry and vendor news. We are dedicated to helping you understand what it takes to accelerate your business by transforming your culture, processes and systems to real-time, thereby driving significant business value in your organization.

Our technology coverage includes the application of business analytics, big data, Internet of Things, cloud infrastructure, Event processing, intelligent BPM and decision management, and any other critical technologies for operating your business in real-time.  Our in-depth specialized content is provided by expert analysts, consultants and enterprise practitioners focused on the real-time enterprise."   

 My role in RTInsights is twofold:  I am writing a weekly post under the "Real-timer", which will provide professional opinions on the area of RTInsights.  There are couple of posts there, one old and one new.    The old one is entitled: "Flying Forward, Looking Backward: Statistical analysis of the past is not enough to navigate the future".    The new one is entitled: "Reversing the Roles".  

The other role is "International Technical Editor" in which I'll cover applications, activities, and companies in this area outside the USA, with an emphasis on developing countries.  

If you wonder where is the third activity of Blogging.  It is quite different one, a relatively new Blog in which I post my own attempts at poetry in Hebrew, though the Blog has a Latin name.

More - later.   

On six years of blogging

Recently the Blog has completed six years.   A lot of things happened during this time,  buzzwords have come and gone, and the understanding of event thinking has been sharpened over time as the hype cycle progresses.   Looking at Google Analytics' statistics,  the most popular postings in this blog are:

1. On unicorn, professor and infant - a debate about event processing and analytics.  The topic of the relationships between event processing and various kind of analytics (a buzzword by its own right) are still popular and relevant.

2. On family trees - this was an off-topic post, that talked about a passover vacation in which I spent a few days tracking the roots of my family. 

3. On Dave Mayer's keynote in DEBS 2012 - this one is relatively recent, and was the champion of the last year's posts.  It talks about the phenomenon of re-inventing wheels, and in particular, Dave Mayer in his DEBS 2012 keynote invented frames which have large overlap with the notion of context.  

As for visitors - totally over the years more than 150,000 distinct readers have passed through the blog, around 3000 have visited at least 200 times.  The countries with most visitors are (in descending order):  USA, UK, Germany, India, Israel, Canada, Philippines, France, Australia and Japan  (I don't know anybody from Philippines... so will be interesting to get a feedback from a reader of that location).   The cities with most visitors are: London, New York, Tel-Aviv,  Bangalore, Manila, Paris, Singapore, Karlsruhe,   and Sydney. 

The most popular referencing site is the almighty google, but there are also many references from complexevent.com, manning.com and TIBCOblogs.

Next yer's Blog will continue to follow the trends and opinions, and will get deeper on my current work about event modeling - after we'll publicly expose it in ER 2013 (November, Hong Kong).

I always wonder why people are reading what I am writing - but the several hundreds of readers per day encourage me to continue...  although I have been written less recently  ( a matter of mood)..

Reflection on blogging in 2012

The year 2012 is going to expire today,  this has been the first year since 1985 that I have not visited the USA (I have been several times in Europe, though), somehow I don't think this will be true for 2013.

Looking at this Blog,  I had less posts this year (this is post 92nd for the year, the record year was 2009 with  162), but the flow of readers was bigger this year than the previous years,  I recently  came across an article in HBR Blog entitled "If you're serious about ideas, get serious about blogging".   

Looking at the popularity test,  the most read post this year was entitled the pilot decision making process,  which shows that the mental thinking of a pilot is situation driven.  One of the main areas that I have investigated this year is how to make people think in a situation driven way when coming to IT systems, which are dominated by the request-response thinking.   

Another popular post was   not about event processing but the one dealt with the question: Is computer science a science or engineering?   This question was triggered by the fact that my daughter Daphna participated in a science day in the high school she was going to attend (and is attending now) and it seems that while this school has computer science major, it does not regard it as a science.    My opinion is that computer science is neither science or engineering but a thing of its own.

Additional ones are again a more generic post on presentation skills.  This is a  soft skill that I think is extremely important in today's world.  I am putting emphasis in all the courses and seminars I am teaching, my source of inspiration, as I have written is Steve Jobs style of presentation.

Several popular professional posts: 

  On temporal extensions to  SQL 2011.      I am following temporal databases for many years, and the eventual extension to SQL is long overdue.   

On event server as the 21st century application server - following Paul Vincent,  I think we are seeing this shift happens.

Last but not least of the popular post was my review of Dave Maier's keynote in DEBS 2012, where I observed that the fragmentation in research make even distinguished researchers to reinvent wheels.

Let's see what blogging topic will be interesting in 2013 -- happy new year.

On five years of blogging

Five years ago I have started this blog. In the first posting entitled "First Blog" I put a picture of myself (from 8 years ago, I think) and stated that I never wrote anything like blog or something similar. This is the 694th posting, and I am amazed that I keep doing it.  I am still amazed every time I run into a person telling me that he or she reads my Blog.  The Blog has been much more visible than I ever imagined,  I have looked at some statistics and report it in the sequel.  Over the years I have been asked several times to advertise stuff (for profit), or allow people to be guest blogger, and always answered politely that this is not really what I have in mind.   The biggest reward I got from this Blog was the offer I received by Manning to write a book following the Blog posts on event processing.  The book "Event Processing in Action" which I wrote with blood, sweat and tears, with Peter Niblett (he was not the reason for the blood and tears), is probably the most important thing I have done so far (but I have some plans to surprise in the future).     As for statistics -- I have looked at two statistics gathering tools, one is Google Analytics which uses an instrumentation I've put into the blog, 2 weeks after I started it,  and the internal statistics of Google Blogs that started in July 2008.  The results are somewhat incompatible (the blog statistics shows higher numbers).  Anyway -- it seems that I had more than 250,000 page views over the years.  Since many of the visitors are one time visitors, it is more interesting to see how many regular readers this blog has - the number seems to be around 2500 that read every post on this blog, and around 5000 more that read most of the blog posts.  I don't know that many people (!).   The readers are coming from 199 countries, where the big ten are:

1). USA, 2). UK, 3). Germany, 4). India, 5). Canada, 6). Israel, 7). Philippines, 8). France, 9). Australia, 10). Japan  - among these countries I never visited in either India or Japan.    Among cities the leading cities are: London, NYC, Bangalore, Tel-Aviv, Manila, Singapore, Karlsruhe and my home city Haifa.

The most read posts were:  On unicorn, professor and infant - where I wrote about hype, analytics and reality.  Interestingly in 2008 the claim was that CEP is over-hyped.  Today the opinion is that analytics is over-hyped.  The second most popular is the post on family trees, an off-topic post where I told about a few days work I invested in constructing family tree during Passover vacation in 2010, and the third one is one of the oldest ones from December 2007 talking about simple events and simple event processing, terms that I don't use anymore.   

Enough statistics for today -- five years of blogging passed quickly, let's see if I will be able to proceed for another five.

Back to professional postings - soon.

Some Blog statistics - December 2010

This year I have not posted the annual statistics about this Blog readership, so taking advantage of the vacation to do it, along with going to movies, musical on stage, and bowling with my daughters.   The Blog now showing on the bottom some of the most popular postings, however, it started recording only several months ago, thus the more accurate statistics are accumulated in Google  Analytics, where this blog is tracked from September 2007.   Starting with the quantities:  There are around 1800 regular readers that are reading each posting in this blog, and additional 3600 who get into the blog from time to time (once every two-three weeks),  There are also  people who entered the blog less frequently, some of them only one time, the total number of this blog visitors is around 65000 people.  The geographic distribution is also interesting, the map is mostly painted in several green variants, so what stands out are the white space, countries from which there was no reader so far.   Europe has not white spot, America has one white spot: Suriname.   Asia has three white spots:  North Korea, Turkmenistan and Tajikistan.   Africa still has only partial coverage, all countries in the north part and south part of the continent are green, but the middle is mostly white.    This may be an indication that the Internet infrastructure in these countries still needs to go some way, or that the content of my blog does not appeal to people in these countries.

As far as the  ten countries with most views, these are:  1). USA; 2). UK; 3). Germany; 4). Canada; 5). Israel; 6). India; 7). France;  8). Japan;  9). Sweden and 10). Australia.  The readers come from 178 countries.

In a city view ten cities with most views, there are: 1). London; 2). NYC; 3). Paris; 4). Karlsruhe;  5). Haifa; 6). Tokyo; 7). Singapore; 8). Bangalore; 9). Göteborg; 10). Vienna. 

About 10.5% of the page views were direct requests, around 25% results of searches, and the rest, references by various websites. 

The most popular posting, is still ,by far, the one entitled "On unicorn, professor and elephant",  which answers a claim that everything done until today in the event processing area is just a hype and worth nothing. Since the time it was written two years ago, there were many proof points the the EP area has value to customers in various industries, and the assertion that it is still an infant, and some vendors do over-hype it is also still valid. 

The second most popular posting, is the one entitled: "On simple event and simple event processing".   This is an early posting.  In the past we used a terminology of: simple event processing (filtering and routing), mediated event processing (aggregation, transformation, composition)  and complex event processing (pattern matching).  However, I stopped using these terms since it got people more confused, due to the fact that different people have different associations with the terms simple and complex, especially the ambiguousness of  complex event processing,  that is interpreted by some as (complex event) processing and by some as complex (event processing).   I also tend to use composite event instead of complex event when talking about event that is composed of events.

The third most popular posting, is the one entitled: "On Enterprise Service Bus and Event Processing"   which is also an early posting,  this also states that event processing capabilities should be part of enterprise computing infrastructure, where ESB is a natural place to be a center point for it.  Since that time EP capabilities became even more pervasive among various technologies.

Somehow related to this is the most popular among the 2010 postings entitled: "Consolidation and pure play in the EP market".  This deals with the fact that most of the EP vendors today are big software vendors that consolidated EP within their products, while there is still a niche for pure play vendors.

While, as the blog title indicates, most of the blog postings deal with event processing, there are several off-topic postings that won a lot of responses, such as the one on positive thinking, and the one in which I described things that I heard from my father about the holocaust.   My last posting on accountability belongs to this family.

This year I spent less time on blogging, so the quantity of postings is less than either 2008 or 2009,  but I intend to catch up.    

The book "Event Processing in Action" is in someway descendant on this blog,  the publishers read the blog before approaching me to write the book,  but of course, there is more emphasis on rigor and quality within the book, the blog is "quick and dirty".      

End of summary -- next posting will go back to professional stuff

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.

On the act of creation

This is a kind of a side topic, but somehow related to this Blog. I am getting various relations to this Blog, some of them as comments, and some as off-line Emails. Recently I have received an Email about it, I'll not cite it, but reading it reminded me a really old book that I have read at the age of 16-17 0r so, called -- the act of creation by Arthur Koestler -- whose cover (from the Amazon site) you can see here. I think that this is the first heavy book I've read in English, and it was not a very easy reading. Anyway --- the book is making a claim that there are three types of "creative people": the scientist, the artist and the joker - both of them apply similar patterns of thinking to achieve a different goal. I have moved through different phases in life -- since early childhood I used to do what is called today "stand-up comedy" in all class parties, with the biggest performance in the final party after high-school graduation; in other phase in life I spent some time on writing poetry and short stories (even published some), and from a certain point in life I have deserted both and became a scientist, which is still how I define myself today.

Thinking in retrospect I tend to agree with Arthur Koestler that these three types of creation share something in common. How does it relate to my Blog ? -- I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader.... Back to "event processing thinking" - soon.

On 20000 visitors in the Blog

The numbere 20,000 typically reminds me of the famous book that you can see some poster taken from the related movie, however, today it means something else -- the 20,000th visitor has visited this Blog. Many of them just arrive there somehow while scanning the cyberspace, more interestingly, around 1,500 visitors are quite frequent repeating visitors, and a similar number are visiting from time to time (but in total visited at least 15 times). 10 percents of the visit were direct, and of the rest, most were referrals from varios type of Google options, and some refering sites: Complexevents (and the forum), Tim Bass's Blog, TIBCO's Blog, RuleCore's Blog and Apama's Blog.

More statistics: The most popular posting, by far, is : "On Unicorn, Professor and Infant"

written in June 2008, and still fresh. The next one is: On Agnon, the dog, playing and downplaying. Soon I'll write a follow up to this one. The third one talks on event stream processing, quite an old one. The next one, like the current posting is gossip about the Blog itself, last time I have written about this Blog, almost a year ago, the Blog had 3,000 visitors.

In terms of geographical distribution -- still most of the readers are from the USA, followed by UK, Israel, Canada, Germany, France, Japan, India and Australia. The number of countries is now 135 - some of the new ones are: Reunion, Guam, Swaziland and Namibia.

As far as cities go -- London keeps the first place, followed by Haifa (my home town) and New York.

That's all for today -- a professional posting will foloow tomorrow.

On the "Event Processing Thinking" Blog - after the first year

One of the ways to obtain events is through "calendar events", this is useful for time-out management, periodic triggering etc. Today I saw in my calendar a reminder: this is the one year anniversary of the "event processing thinking" Blog - you should write something about it. Actually, yesterday I got a note from one of the analyst firms that research the impact of Web 2.0 on companies and was asked to participate in this study on my Blogger hat... This is not the first time that people approach me based on reading my Blog for various purposes, and actually I can say that I have under-estimated the power of Blogs and the amount of visibility it gets. This is probably the most visible communication vehicle exists today (how many people are reading papers?)

Looking at the Blogland I also realized that the visibility can be a double-edged sword, since people can easily expose their own ignorance, so I am trying to write only on stuff that I think
I know something about...

One thing that is interesting is the statistics (who reads the Blog) - it seems that the previous time I've written about statistics has been one of the most read postings (see below).

Looking at the Google Analytics statistics it seems that since the start of measurement (I've installed Google Analytics 2 weeks after the Blog start) more than 10,000 distinct persons (10,139 to be exact) have read this Blog. I don't have any illusion that there are 10,000 people who are interested in event processing, and some got due to the wonders of the almighty Google (e.g. looked for a picture of unicorn), so a better metrics is to see that 1/3 of the readers returned more that once, and 1432 readers returned more than 50 times - which is the more reasonable number the amount of people interested in the content. It seems that the amount of people who read all or at least 2/3 of the Blog postings is around 800, and this seem to be the size of effective readership.

What else can I learn from the statistics? The most popular postings are:

(1). Agnon, the dog, playing and downplaying is still, and by far the most popular one, in this posting is one of the postings where I claim that "event processing" is a discipline that stands on its own fits, and not a footnote to database technology or business rule technology.

(2). Revisiting the Blog **2 again which, like this posting, is talking about statistics around this Blog, I wonder why this posting is so popular (or people wanted to look at the map of Arkansas to plan their next holiday.

(3). On infant, professor and unicorn despite the fact that this posting is much younger, it had a lot of traction, some because people are looking for pictures of unicorns, and some because always disputes bring more rating... However, rating is not all, and when I think that I've said all that I need to say about particular topic, I move on.

As far as the geographical distribution of readers: there have been readers from 124 countries.
In terms of amount of entries - the big ones are:
(1). USA, (2). UK, (3). Israel, (4). Japan, (5). Germany, (6). Canada, (7). France and (8).India. As far as the amount of individual readers - the big ones are:
(1). USA, (2). UK, (3). Germany, (4). India, (5). Australia, (6). Israel, (7). France and (8). Holland. So it seems that in Japan I have relatively small (less than 100) but loyal set of readers - I am still looking for some opportunity to travel to Japan - never been there (actually I have never been in India either).
In the USA there are now readers from all 50 states (+ DC) and the leading are: California, Massachusetts and New York. Putting Arkansas map helped - and now Arkansas in the 16th place in the USA in visits.

The three big cities in terms of visits are still : (1). London, (2). New York City, (3). Bangalore.

I'll not survey the negative and positive reviews about this Blog - and let every reader judge. that is the essence of the entire Web 2.o business! -- well, that's all for today; Will return soon with a more professional posting.

Revisiting the Blog ** 2 again

I have never been in Arkansas, and in return - nobody from Arkansas have ever read my Blog - not surprisingly. What is surprising is that in the rest of the USA states (with the exception of North Dakota) have people who live there, or at least visited there and have read this Blog.

I have done some investigation on - who reads this Blog, when the Blog has hit 1000 distinct readers. I have decided to re-visit the statistics if the Blog ever hits 3000 readers - when I checked it this morning I found out 3217 distinct readers, so it is a good time to look at some statistics, actually this number is quite surprising, since I don't really think that there are so many people interested in this, and indeed some are probably passing by in the Internet roads, however the statistics show that around 45% returned more than one time. Moreover 569 people has visited the Blog more than 50 times (172 of them more than 200 times, where the number of Blog postings did not reach 100 yet), so I guess that this is provide the size of the community who really reads the material.

From Geographical point of view, it seems that I still writing mostly for the USA readers - 1530 distinct readers (almost half of the readers). In number of accesses - USA is the first, UK second, Israel third followed by- Japan, Thailand, Canada, India, France, Spain and Germany. However, when looking at the number of "distinct readers" - it is somewhat different order -- USA is still first and UK still second, but here Canada is third followed by - India, Israel, Germany, France, Australia, Holland and Sweden. There is coverage of all continents - some of our neighbors - "the Palestinian Territory" that does not have map yet in Google analytics, so I don't know where exactly, Egypt, Lebanon, Lybia and Iran are all represented. from South America - almost all access are from Brazil, some sporadic ones from other countries. In Africa - South Africa and some countries in the north - but also - Sudan, Kenya and Uganda. Also coverage of almost all countries in Europe and Asia - total 92 countries. As far as cities - the three big cities, in number of accesses are: Petach-Tikwa (in Israel), London and Bangkok;

the big cities in number of distinct readers are: London, New York City and Bangalore.

The biggest source of reference is Google in various ways, followed by other Blogs like - the CEP Blog, TIBCO's Blog and Rulecore's Blog and from David Luckham's site

The most popular postings were:

1. Agnon, the dog, playing and downplaying in which I stated the opinion that Business Rules are a possible way to implement CEP, but not the only way - which lead to several more postings investigating the relationships.

2. On Event stream Processing in which I stated my controversial opinion that the term "event stream processing" does not represent anything interesting, and the person invented it, Mark Palmer, thinks it should go away.

3. On the mythical event per second in which I stated that "event per second" really means nothing outside the context of a specific benchmark. I have dedicated more postings to this issue.

4. On bitter pills , a recent posting that answered Tim Bass' criticism about the state of the EP market, provided more optimistic view (followed by some constructive assertions in the next posting).

It seems that the popular ones are the macro-level - but I'll continue from time to time also to write on micro-level things, since it seems to have its audience also. The most popular to those who got through search engines were related to XTP and context terms - so I need to get back to them also.

So - thanks to all the readers -- more event processing related postings - later.

Blog **2 - A Blog about this Blog - after the first 1000 readers

Today I have processed the event that the number of "absolute unique visitors" is 1004 at the time I am writing this lines, and this deserves some reflections about this Blog. To be exact I may miss some readers in the statistics, since I have started the Blog in August 28, and started measuring in September 11. It seems, surprisingly, that people are reading this Blog, my previous experience with writing was writing poetry as a teenager, and this was long ago...
Anyway, I have drawn some statistics: Out of the 1004 readers, 12 have comments - the one who sent the highest amount of comments by far is Harvey Reed.
There were also a few who commented in their own Blogs - with or without explicitly mentioning me. The Geographical distribution is also interesting - most of my visits are from USA - 878 visits out of total of 1,798. This is true also for the "absolute unique visitors" - 525, which is the majority. So I am writing mostly for the USA folks - however, other countries have also contributed visitors to the "absolutely unique" list - UK is second with 89, India 44 and Canada 43 come next, and then France with 24, Australia and Israel with 23 each. The total is 59 countries - including one country that I have not previously heard of: Saint Kitts and Navis
as well as some of our neighbours - Kuwait, Iran, Egypt, Cyprus and Turkey - and countries in
all continents. Around half of the readers have returned, and some have returned more than 100 times (!!!). About the content - While most has entered the "root" - the most popular direct entries were those who dealt somehow with business rules: the most recent one and the first in this series. I am not sure they have made me very popular among the business rule guys (???). Next were the blog entry with all the TLAs and the mythical event per second piece. The most popular traffic source has been direct traffic (around 20%), and out of the referral site - the biggest by far is the almighty Google, however 10% of the traffic to my Blog has been referred from Tim Bass's Blog , I think that I have mentioned before that Tim has urged me for months to write a blog, so Tim's Blog is in a way my "parent Blog". About the content - I did not find strong correlation between the type of content provided and the number of visitors in that day, so I'll continue to experiment with writing all kind of staff (macro and micro issues) and react to other community Blogs. There are plenty of topics that I have promised to come back to, but will continue doing it in a random fashion. So - thanks a lot for the 1007 readers (the number has grown since I started writing this Blog), and see you in the next real Blog (this one probably does not count)...