Much has been written about big data (insert air quotes) over the last 12 months and articles are now regularly showing up in mainstream publications (also see: Six Provocations for Big Data, IBM‘s Big Data landing page, and a couple of NYT articles from the past few months here and here). During a panel during The TV of Tomorrow conference held earlier this month in San Francisco, Jeremy Toeman suggested big data was a bubble.  He made this comment with a reference to twitter and other similar data.  I’ll call these data public data – which suggests there are private data which I’ll talk more about below.