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Now that TechEssence has had a chance to settle down to business, it seems a good opportunity to canvass readers about topics they'd like to see us address. I know we've got some left over from last time, but I also suspect that new readers have new ideas. Please, leave a comment with yours!

Data mining or knowledge discovery refers to the process of finding interesting information in large repositories of data. The term data mining also refers to the step in the knowledge discovery process in which special algorithms are employed in hopes of identifying interesting patterns in the data. These interesting patterns are then analyzed yielding knowledge. The desired outcome of data mining activities is to discover knowledge that is not explicit in the data, and to put that knowledge to use.

Librarians involved in digital libraries are already benefiting from data mining techniques as they explore ways to automatically classify information and explore new approaches for subject clustering (MetaCombine Project). As the field grows, new applications for libraries are likely to evolve and it will be important for library administrators to have a basic understanding of the technology.

A wide variety of data mining techniques are also employed by industry and government. Many of these activities pose threats to personal privacy. As professionals ethically bound to ensure that individual privacy is safe-guarded, data mining activities should be monitored and kept on every librarian’s radar.

The title of this post is a fancy way of saying "we broke the site temporarily; sorry about that."

Some posts that had been categorized lost their categorization yesterday. TechEssence contributors

So what would folks like to hear about? Name the three technologies or tech-related phenomena you would most like to see encapsulated here. We'll do our best to oblige you!

Beginnings are times of great peril and possibility. Whether you are starting down a real road or a virtual one, potholes lie in wait just as do happy surprises. Should we give in to our fears and avoid starting new projects, or journeys, or relationships? Of course not. So how do we best face our fears, and take that leap of faith?