I have been making my living for 8 years doing SEO for my own sites as an affiliate marketer. It's hard since I am unwilling to promote products that are not valuable for customers... so much out there AND so much being pushed by the competition in various niches.

I have been working on my own application to help people like me make more sense of their projects, which are inherently vague since one might make 50 websites, and need to track what efforts pay off and which don't... changes happen all the time in SEO. Anyway I just wanted to say thank you SO much for writing this 'musing' as you called it.... you probably didn't think much of it but it has been my window into discovering what Big Data is really about, and what some software companies like MetaMarkets and Quid are doing with it. It's fascinating and it gives me more ideas to make my application more valuable for customers.

Thank you for this unexpected intro to big data.

Ian