Posts Tagged "data"

Vivek Kundra, CIO of the USA, WTF?

Posted by on Aug 27, 2010 in Commentary, Tech | 0 comments

Wiz-bang “open” government web sites are not bad ideas, quite the contrary I think they are very good ideas, I just think that the administration picked the wrong people to do the job.

Yes, I was quoted as saying that recently and I do not take it back.

Here’s the guy I dislike, the CIO of the USA, Vivek Kundra, note that his career starts on 9/11/2001 and that there are no entries previous to that:

Vivek Kundra – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

And of course the article I originally read that detailed some of Mr. Kundra’s failings is “down for maintenance” so I had to find a cached version from Google:

Dvorak allegations againt US CIO and the Kundra bio on the White House website – UPDATED

The government approved and went ahead with this web site for $18M just for “rebuilding”, which might lead you to believe it wasn’t an entirely new website, and it isn’t, so what the heck is the $18M for?

Recovery.gov

And here’s who got the money:

Updated: Hoyer-linked firm wins $18M Recovery.gov contract | Washington Examiner

This is a related site that has “tons” of freely available information on it but I hear a lot of negative things about it (admittedly things I can’t verify since I’m not a researcher):

Data.gov

OK, I’m going back to do some real work.

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How “metadata” Effects Your Business

Posted by on Oct 8, 2008 in Commentary, Tech | 0 comments

OK, first things first, what is metadata? For that we turn to everyone’s favorite authority Wikipedia:

Metadata (meta data, meta-data, or sometimes metainformation) is “data about data”, of any sort in any media. An item of metadata may describe an individual datum, or content item, or a collection of data including multiple content items and hierarchical levels, for example a database schema.

For most small businesses I expect they have no idea what metadata is so the small business owner may assume they don’t need to know (“I don’t know what it is so I must not be using it“). Do you ever provide an electronic copy of a Microsoft Word document to a customer or client? If you answered yes then you have exchanged metadata with your customers or clients. Sounds a little like a one night stand doesn’t it?

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