When I began researching for this, the pilot episode, it was immediately apparent to me that #BigData was fundamentally different from data as we have known it for hundreds of years. We could just do so much more with it. It was changing industries, governments, people, and relationships between these entities rapidly and permanently. But what I couldn’t get a finger on was why. Why was Big Data different from data as we have known it for hundreds of years? If it’s something ancient, just bigger, why does it change the world?br br I didn’t have to wait too long to find the answer. In the very first chapter of Victor Meyer Schonberger’s Big Data, a book written about seven years ago, he gets to it pretty straight. When things change a lot in scale, they begin to change in essence also. If the rate of change is dramatic (double differential is out of whack), the thing itself begins to change. This is what makes Big Data essentially different from data ever before in human civilization.br br Listen!br br This is the first episode of a #LetsTalkAbout series on Big Data.