Wired: Picking the Next President

I achieved one of my mini-career goals this month with the publication of my first Wired article. In the article, which was part of their cover package on “The Petabyte Age,” I look at the Democratic firm Catalist, which is trying to build the most comprehensive political database ever imagined:

“Want to know exactly how many Democratic-leaning Asian Americans making more than $30,000 live in the Austin, Texas, television market? Catalist, the Washington, DC, political data-mining shop, knows the answer. CTO Vijay Ravindran says his company has compiled nearly 15 terabytes of data for this election year ó orders of magnitude larger than the databases available just four years ago. (In 2004, Howard Dean’s formidable campaign database clocked in at less than 100 GB, meaning that in one election cycle the average data set has grown 150-fold.) In the next election cycle, we should be measuring voter data in petabytes.”