I was just looking at my web analytics numbers and we seem to have crossed some milestones.

The site has now gotten more than 50,000 views since being launched in Dec 2007.

Thank you everyone for your help in this. More importantly the quality of comments has been fabulous. Since I am out of ideas for the rest of the week- here is a best of posts collection.
Here are some of the most favorite articles as measured by number of page views. I have personal fovurites as well, but these are just the ranks as per page views and how they measure up.

Top 5 Interviews

1) Interviews with SAS Institute leaders- I have found generally great professionalism from SAS Institute people. This is surprising because comin from an open source background, SAS is often looked as a big brother. I find that more of a perception and less of a reality as the company continues to innovate.

a) with John Sall, founder SAS Institute- This is really the biggest interview I did in terms of the person involved. To my surprise ( I wasnt expecting John to say yes) the interview was really frank, and it came very fast. The answers seem to be written by John himself.

Quote- Quantitative fields can be fairly resistant to recession- John Sall.

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/07/28/interview-john-sall-jmp/

b) Interview with Anne Milley, Director, Product Marketing , SAS Institute- This is a favourite because it came very soon after the NYTimes article on R etc. One of my personal opinions is that the difference between great and good leaders is often the fact that great leaders are humble enough  to learn and then build on their strengths. It ran in two parts- and I was really appreciative of the in-depth answers that Anne wrote.

Quotes-

Analytics continues to be our middle name.

Customers vote with the cheque book.

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/03/06/interview-with-anne-milley-sas-ii/

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/03/04/interview-anne-milley-sas-part-1/

c) Jim Davis- CMO, SAS Institute

This came after Jim Davis issued his views on Business Intelligence as an over used term, contrasting it with business analytics.and British BI expert Peter Thomas called him out on that.  As a data mining student I wanted to side with Jim Davis, but as a business intelligence learner I found Peter’s views great to read as well. I am still trying on finding this the difference between BI and BA. We need more of business analytics and better quality business intelligence to prevent disasters like mortgage forecasting etc

Traditional business intelligence (BI) as we know it is outdated and insufficient.

http://www.decisionstats.com/tag/jim-davis/

d) Interview with Alison Bolen -Common sense would dictate that smaller companies would be better adapters of social media, given the low cost and high visibilty. Yet in all aspects that I study, from search engine optimization to twitter penetration, Facebook pages number of fans, blogs -the maximum quantity and quality of content continues to come from the communications team at the biggest and oldest business analytics vendor, SAS. Alison Bolen is one of the best social media and communications editor I have seen in the BI industry.

Quote- We’re so used to writing white papers, brochures, maginze articles that the concept of writing 200 words on a topic from your day is very foreign to us.

http://www.decisionstats.com/tag/alison-bolen/

e) Interview wit Gary Cokins- I am still trying to read his book, but the fall semester started and I am very impressed by Gary Cokins lucid and clear views on using and integrating business analytics for strategic change and improvement in performance across the organization.

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/06/18/interview-gary-cokins-sas-institute/

2) Interviews with R professionals.

a) David Smith- Director of Community at Revolution Computing.

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/05/29/interview-david-smith-revolution-computing/

b) Richard Schultz, CEO Revolution Computing

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/01/31/interviewrichard-schultz-ceo-revolution-computing/

REvolution continues to be a very very good tech company to watch for. Their product enhancements are great, particulraly their work in enhancing R for speed, and their community management is superb. David’s excellent blog is almost like reading a journal in itself on R and a must read for any R learner.

c) Interview with Paul van Eikeren, Inference for R

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/06/04/inference-for-r/

Inference for R is a good example for open source and properietary systems working together with both GPL compliance and best of all- customer ease in using software.

d) Interview with Dr Graham Williams

People come up to me and say R has a diificult syntax. It has a very very flexible syntax, which makes it powerful for usage. If all you wanted to do was make great data mining models, the software by Dr Williams is a pioneer in R GUIs.

Rattle continues to be a must install package in R, and this was a nice interview in the both the depth of experience as well breadth of perspective by the creator of Rattle, which is also having a commerical derivative now.

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/01/13/interview-dr-graham-williams/

e) Interview with Bob Muenchen- This interview with the author of R for SAS and SPSS users was the first big interview I did, the book review was read many many times. In fact I now work in same university as Bob. Great common sensical views from an experienced statistical author and consultant.

http://www.decisionstats.com/2009/01/21/r-for-sas-and-spss-users/

( to be continued- this is a partial list)