Friday Notes

I added some cool sessions to the agenda this week, so I thought I'd highlight a few here:Scaling the Social Graph in the Cloud -- This discussion will review the technical challenges to running queries that traverse 4, 5 or more relationships across extremely large graph datasets in the cloud.  Advanced data analytics is  moving the analysis of data that may be unstructured and only informally related to multiple entities. Advanced data analytics for web applications can create very large datasets where the relationships may be separated by many degrees, causing significant development challenges for the database layer. Relational database development will be contrasted with graph database development.A Deep Dive into the NPR API -- NPR was the first major media organization to launch a comprehensive public API.  The API itself can be found at http://www.npr.org/api, along with our Query Generator (http://www.npr.org/api/queryGenerator.php), a comprehensive interface that makes using the API easy.Since the launch, the API has grown tremendously and has realized our goals way more than we expected.  We are delivering over 700 million stories per month using the API (roughly 23 million per day), and that number is growing.  Public users are building fantastic applications (like NPR Addict - http://www.passtimesoftware.com/).  Meanwhile, NPR stations are building their sites around the NPR API, such as KQED (http://www.kqed.org/), WBUR (http://www.wbur.org/) and SCPR (http://www.scpr.org/).  Aggregators and partners are making extensive use of it as well, including Google and Yahoo!The biggest value to NPR, however, is the fact that the NPR API is now the basis of our entire digital infrastructure. NPR.org, our mobile sites and apps, and everything else we do is based on it.  Our iPad site and app are also based entirely on the API.  We are truly eating our own dog food.As leaders in the media API space, I plan to share our experiences and copious knowledge with the conference attendees.  I can easily discuss the technical underpinnings that have made it successful, how we have created revenue opportunities around the API, how we have solved some of the metrics issues, how we made the business case to actually make it public, the legal issues involved in a public and private API, etc. ===In addition to those two sessions, I've added some stuff around Scalr, the CSO of Zynga, and David Linthicum giving a closing keynote that looks at the future of service/web/cloud architectures. In other words, Gluecon's agenda continues to get better and better. I hope you'll join us for what promises to be the single most exciting tech conference this spring.