Throughout the two days I found myself constantly presented with new ideas — of course, many of these were not new at all, just new for me to think about. So when Richard Nash talked about "small data" (metadata about you: your cookies, your web search history, your Amazon clicks, and so on), I knew it was an old topic, but he brought new life to it in a way that made me suddenly start to care.

Small data is something else again. Think of all the digital tidbits consumers leave in their paths as they go through the day. Credit card payments, location fixes, newsletter signups, Facebook likes, tweets and Web searches. As Deborah Estrin stated at TEDMED 2013, "Small data are derived from our individual digital traces. We generate these data because most of us mediate or at least accompany our lives with mobile technologies. As a result, we all leave a 'trail of breadcrumbs' behind us with our digital service providers, which together create our digital traces."

And that leads me to the one quibble I have with the article: It's framed in terms of Big Data. But if you think about it, this is pretty small data. He even says, "Heck, if your local brick-and-mortar deli, pet store or even fishing-bait shop is willing to upload its Quickbooks data or other sales and inventory information to a cloud service, they might eventually be able to reap the rewards of big data, too," but compared to "big data" (no matter how you feel like defining that), Quickbooks seems to just be "data". Maybe even "small data". From small companies.