How 'Big Data" became the word of the year

In today's NPR Fresh Air program, linguist Geoffrey Nunberg chose "Big Data" as the word of the year (listen to this podcast).  I personally agree.

Data mining was a big part of Obama campaign's victory secret this year, but also the word is also mentioned widely in many publications.

Back in Feb 2010, Economist ran a cover story on The Data Deluge. It essentially said "Data, data everywhere".

But the term "big data" started to appear only on this year. In New York Times' article on February 11, 2012,  "The Age of Big Data", we start to see the term get used. New York Times then had a follow-up article in August titled "How Big Data Became So Big".

Harvard Business Review had its October 2012 issue devoted to "Big Data", discussing its impact on management revolution to career choice as data scientists.

On November 18,  2 weeks after the election, Wall Street Journal  had an article on Obama's 'Big Data' Victory.  

Indeed, "Big Data" has become a buzz word, and I vote for it to be the Word of the Year too!


(By the way, I like Numberg's comment: "In the old days nobody knows you are a dog on the Internet. Now everybody knows what dog food you buy.")