The article seems to focus on the big picture of log files of services that are all interconnected in some way... this makes for the most impressive mental pict

The article seems to focus on the big picture of log files of services that are all interconnected in some way... this makes for the most impressive mental picture perhaps, forming "the tributaries feeding an ocean of data in the Cloud"; however, the exponential decrease in cost of computing power, data storage, and bandwidth has this effect on any information that we can digitize. Some of the most interesting developments will likely be in more or less isolated fields. I am excited to see the interplay between field-specific developments (finding patterns in a genome) and broader algorithmic work (finding patterns in any data). I suppose this is already happening, but it will become increasingly visible to laymen over time.