Feb 13 is the official KDnuggets Day: the 15th anniversary of KDnuggets.com domain.
I organized the first 3 workshops on Knowledge Discovery in Data in 1989, 1991, and 1993, and started the
Knowledge Discovery Nuggets e-mail newsletter in 1993
(here is the very first issue)
as a way to connect researchers who attended the KDD-93 workshop in Anaheim, CA.
In May of 1994 I launched a web site called Knowledge Discovery Mine at GTE Labs. I was receiving many inquiries about software, meetings, and other activities related to KDD, so a website with the directory of everything related to knowledge discovery seemed like a good way to answer these questions. Michael Beddows and Chris Matheus also helped a lot with the original Knowledge Discovery Mine at GTE.
When I left GTE in 1997, I moved the Knowledge Discovery Mine to a new domain, KDnuggets.com (registered Feb 13, 1997). The name stands for Knowledge Discovery nuggets - short items related to Knowledge Discovery in Data.
Here is how the KDnuggets homepage looked in the June of 1997.
KDnuggets went thru many iterations over the years. From 1993 to 1999, it was purely a labor of love, without any ads or income.
However, at the end of 1999 our analytics consulting group at Knowledge Stream Partners stopped receiving work from our banking clients, since the banks froze the systems changes before Y2K. Faced with both a salary cut, and a lot more free time, I worked to make KDnuggets self-supporting with advertising, but always kept ads relevant to analytics and data mining. KDnuggets ads have been quite effective, and several of our advertisers (including SAS) have been with KDnuggets for all of these years.
In 2001, when the dot com bubble burst, I left Xchange and started data mining consulting and running KDnuggets full-time. In addition, I was also very involved in SIGKDD, helping organize and run KDD conferences.
KDnuggets has grown with the times.
Notable additions include
- Jobs and Academic/Research Positions
- A data mining course, (free teaching modules for a semester-long undergraduate course on data mining)
- many new sections including Courses, Education, and Webcasts
- forums
- KDnuggets Daily blog at www.kdnuggets.com/news
- a very active Twitter account
- a facebook page www.facebook.com/kdnuggets
- and a LinkedIn group: KDnuggets Analytics and Data Mining.
2011 has been a record year for KDnuggets, with the largest number of unique monthly visitors (over 50,000 in Q4 of 2011), and the highest number of job ads and other promotions.
Although the buzzwords describing the field have changed - from Knowledge Discovery to Data Mining to Predictive Analytics, and now to Data Science, the essense has remained the same - discovery of what is true and useful in the mountains of data. Curiosity and pattern recognition are very important components of human intelligence, so all people do "data mining" on a small scale in their daily lifes. However, data mining on a large scale is a much more challenging activity and attracts some of the best minds.
I feel very lucky to be able to cover such an exciting field and to keep KDnuggets among the Top Influencers in Big Data, Data Mining, and Analytics.
What motivates me the most is the incredible energy and enthusiasm of my colleagues, students, industry people, and researchers, data miners, data scientists, and I am very grateful to many thousands of my readers and subscribers for their support!
Comments:
Saed Sayad
Dear Gregory,
Thank you for all your efforts on building a very valuable website for our data mining community. KDnuggets.com has always been in my favorite list. Wish you success for many years to come.
Florin Gorunescu
Happy Birthday for KDn
Eric King
Congrats on 15 Gregory! As a steady KDnuggets.com advertiser since '95, it's been a thrill to watch the newsletter and website flourish. KDNuggets.com's Google rankings ain't bad either! =^}
Gregory PS
thank you ! If I knew KDnuggets would do so well, I would have chosen a shorter name, but "Nuggets" was already taken by Denver Nuggets.
Sandro
Congratulations Gregory! KDnuggets is definitely the top 1 resource for analytics! Thanks for your effort. All the best!
Gregory PS
Sandro, thank you , and I look forward to reading your always interesting blog !