Who are the top influencers in
Big Data, Analytics, Data Mining?

KDnuggets was #15 on Forbes List of Top Influencers in Big Data. Who are the others, and who influences Analytics and Data Mining?

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I was pleased to see KDnuggets as #15 on Forbes List of Top Influencers in Big Data.

Forbes used a tool called Traackr, which combines influences in relevant keywords across blogs, facebook, and twitter.

The top 5 influencers in Forbes list were

1. Bob Gourley of CTO Vision, @bobgourley.
2. David Smith of Revolution Analytics, @revodavid.
3. Klint Finley of SiliconAngle, @klintron.
4. Barb Darrow of GigaOM, @gigabarb.
5. Kristen Nicole of SiliconANGLE, @KristenNicole2.

Of these, only David Smith covers Analytics as Vice President, Marketing of Revolution Analytics, which provides commercial tools based on R language.

Although Analytics is probably the most important aspect of Big Data, only 5 people on Forbes list were strongly connected to Analytics/Data Mining/Data Science.

In addition to David Smith above, these included

#6. Jeff Kelly, @jeffreyfkelly, who writes on trends in business analytics and big data technologies

#14. James Taylor, @jamet123, Expert in the management and automation of operational business decisions.

#15. Gregory Piatetsky, @kdnuggets, KDnuggets Editor, Analytics and Data Mining Expert, co-founder of KDD and SIGKDD.

#20. Vincent Granville, @analyticbridge, founder of AnalyticBridge, social network for analytics professionals.

The Forbes list also does not include any companies, like IBM, EMC, AsterData, or Cloudera which one would expect to have influence in this space.

Another tool for measuring influence online is Klout, which mainly focuses on Twitter, but also includes facebook and Google+ activity. Klout influences lists are based on activity in the past 90 days.

Since I have been covering Data Mining extensively, I was pleased to see KDnuggets as the top influencer for data mining, although this term is now less popular than few years ago.

Top Influencers for Data Mining according to Klout were

1. Gregory Piatetsky-Shapiro (KDnuggets), KDnuggets Editor, data mining / analytics expert, KDD & SIGKDD co-founder. @kdnuggets. Klout: 51
2. DataMiningTips, @DataMiningTips. Klout: 22.
3. Eric King, Predictive Modeling & Data Mining Public Training. @data_mining. Klout: 22.
4. Dean Abbott, Data Mining and Predictive Analytics Consultant. @deanabb. Klout: 36
5. Frank Podlaha, Cloud Solution Architect. @CarpData. Klout: 29

Top Influencers for Big Data according to Klout were:

1. DJ Patil, @dpatil , Data Scientist in Residence at Greylock. Klout: 59
2. O'Reilly Strata Conference, covering Big Data and Data Science, @strataconf, Klout: 52
3. Pete Skomoroch, Research Scientist at LinkedIn, Runs DataWrangling.com @peteskomoroch, Klout: 53.
4. Pete Warden Jetpac.com founder, ReadWriteWeb writer, O'Reilly Data Source Handbook author, @petewarden. Klout: 45
5. Cloudera, the leading provider of Apache Hadoop-based software and services, @cloudera. Klout: 53
6. Jeff Hammerbacher, a founder and the Chief Scientist of Cloudera. Past leader of Facebook Data Team. @hackingdata, Klout: 40.
7. Bradford Cross, design and data expert, @bradfordcross, Klout: 50.
8. Todd Lipcon, Engineer at Cloudera, Hadoop/HBase committer, @tlipcon, Klout: 45.
9. Aster Data, provider of big data management and big data analysis. @asterdata, Klout: 29
10. Curt Monash, Industry analyst. Consultant. Blogger (DBMS2, Strategic Messaging). @CurtMonash, Klout: 43.

The Klout Top influencers for Analytics were heavily biased towards web analytics. The top 10 are

1. Avinash Kaushik, @avinash, Analytics Guru. Klout: 69
2. KISSmetrics.com, @KISSmetrics, online software helps online businesses turn analytics into insights that guide decision-making and growth. Klout: 65
3. Google Analytics, @googleanalytics, The latest news and content from the Google Analytics team and friends. Klout: 57
4. Jim Sterne, @jimsterne, Founder, eMetrics Marketing Optimization Summit, Web Analytics Association Klout: 44.
5. . Yahoo! Web Analytics, @YWebAnalytics, Tips and updates from Yahoo! Web Analytics (YWA). Klout: 29.
6. Caleb Whitmore, @analyticspros, Google Analytics Certified Partner, Author, Founder of Analytics Pros & GAUGE Conferences. Klout: 45
7. Jonny Longden, @jonnylongden, Director of Analytics & Accountability at R/GA London - author of actionable-analytics.com. Klout: 40
8. Webtrends, @Webtrends, Digital mrktg optimization + analytics across mobile, social, web. Klout: 49
9. Dennis Mortensen, @DennisMortensen, Entrepreneur, Author and CEO of Predictive Analytics company. Klout: 48.
10. SmartData Collective, @SmartDataCo, Expert writers on analytics, BI and big data brought. Klout: 43.

Of course actual influence is more than online influence. Clearly, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, or Reid Hoffman have huge influence on Big Data topics, even if they don't write blogs or tweet.

Who are your online influencers for Analytics, Data Mining, Big Data on LinkedIn, Facebook?

What about the research conferences like KDD, and ICDM, and industry conferences like Predictive Analytics World or many others - see www.kdnuggets.com/meetings/ ?

Comments:

Gregory PS
I checked PeekYou and it is very different. It is not for influence finding, but more for investigating people or stalking. Peekyou finds an uncomfortable amount of information about a person, but it will not tell you whom to follow on the topic of Big Data or Data Mining.

Ramy Ghaly
Interesting analysis Gregory and congratulations for making the "Big Data" List. RE to your question, have you checked out PeekYou? PeekYou is a search company focused on indexing the public web around people. The company's primary goal is to index people with their public web URLs. To date, over 250 million people have been indexed. PeekYou.com is a Quantcast Top-600 people search site serving over 5 million unique visitors every month. As of February 24th, 2011, www.peekyou.com was ranked 562 according to Quantcast. Read more? http://www.peekyou.com/about/corporate/aboutus/


Gregory PS
Lutz, agree - these tools are not perfect, but their goal is to measure "online" influence and only among writers and content creators in cyberspace. The Klout results actually look quite reasonable to me - many will agree that Avinash Kaushik has the most influence on Analytics writing.

Lutz Finger
The best sentence is: "Of course actual influence is more than online influence. Clearly, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, or Reid Hoffman have huge influence on Big Data topics, even if they don't write blogs or tweet."

There are many tools out there who want to measure INFLUENCE. Each of them uses a mix of the 'same' technologies. (even we at Fisheyeanalytics.com do this). However the issue are for all the same

A) not all influential people are using the measured media (as you stated very well)
B) not all tools use the same media (traackr focused on RSS feeds, Klout on twitter etc).

C) but the worst issue is: no tool can detect the 'reference group'. If Mashable writes about nuclear energy it will get for sure some reactions. Probably more then the physicists who writes to his small follower group. However it could easily be that the physicist is more influential.

While for A) and B) there will be a de-facto standard... C) is really hard to solve.

Tom H. C. Anderson
Congrats Gregory!

Gregory PS
what other tools exist for measuring influence online ?