blogwebinar.com

Blogophere By The Minute

Thursday Report - Intelliseek in Wall Street Journal

This morning, the Wall Street Journal's Carl Bialik - aka "The Numbers Guy" - wrote a superb piece entitled "Measuring the Impact of Blogs Requires More than Counting."    Intelliseek's BlogPulse engineer Natalie Glance is quoted extensively. Meanwhile, our Tuesday webinar was a huge success with over 80 sign-ups. Big thanks to Sue MacDonald, author of BlogPulse Highlights, for partnering with me on this one.   Next up: Blogs and Employees on June 9th.

Belated Start...But Still A Start

OK, I would not have expected this to happen in Seattle, but our conference wireless connection broke down for the first couple hours this morning.  The connection's back on and I feel like I just had an oxygen tube put in my mouth. Anyway, in case you are wondering about the buzz around the blog business summit, here's a fun chart.  Courtesy of BlogPulse.

Next Up: Molly Holzchlage

Another fine speaker, Molly Holzschlag, a long-time blogger, is walking through some of the key fundamentals of blogging.  She talks of the "Holy Trinity of Blogging."

• Comment systemes
• Talkback/Pingback
• Aggregation Technology

Importantly, she offers some watchouts about enabling comments.  If you are not positioned to manage comments, don't bother.  A few other notes on comments, taken directly from her comments.

• Comment systems are a powerful means of building community easily
• Regular comments on topics will broaden your ranking scope (the "accidental blogger" effect
• Most blog software makes implementing comments easy
• Be aware of comment system spam and how to manage it
• Do NOT employ comment systems if you can't moderate them or effectively moderate spam.

Dances with Blog Entrepreneurs

The next speaker, Chris Pirillo, is dancing all over the stage talking about some pretty clever techniques for making money via blog content.  He's making real cash.  He's triggering quite a debate.   Much of this deals with how blog content can be monetized. 

Next Up: Marc Canter and Chris Pirillo

This session just opened up with opera. Not really but the speaker, Marc Canter, just opened up with operatic blurb...to get our attention I presume.  Anyway, he's touching upon some fairly bold themes.  He opened by showing a multimedia video -- presented off a blog -- introducing his talk.  He then proceeded to suggest that "companies outsource their internal functions."   One prediction for the future: digital lifestyle aggregators.  He's hip on open-standards, packs a wallup in his presentation, and could give a hoot if folks can't pentrate his impenetrable tech vocabulary.  (Yes, I'm struggling to keep up.)   Stand by for my next lame attempt to over-simplify his next section. 

Passion and Authority

"The two things that relaly make a good blog are passion and authority," Scoble explains.  He proceeded to talk about his own purchase behavior, including the process of purchasing wine.  He relayed how at dinner parties the passion and authority around wine comes across so strong that it's hard not to be impacted by this.  He's absolutely right, and this is why consumer generated media (CGM) found on message boards and blogs is so critical to monitor. 

Blogs and the "Campaign Radar"

Ever since we launched CampaignRadar, folks have been asking us about whether we were able to "pre-identify" any hot issues. Let me just say this. We often see huge and furious spikes in blog activity that suggest that the "news" will stick around for awhile. In early August, we saw this when the first "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" video started working the blog circuit. As the attached chart suggests, bloggers were all over this fully two weeks before the video made the front page of the New York Times and Kerry filed a formal complaint about the ad. Which begs the question...What if the campaign had heeded the blog bulge earlier?

Blog Tech Notes from Our CTO Sundar

I've spent the later part of my career studying search as well as text mining technologies. One reason why I've been so captivated by blogs is the significance with which their discussion flow and sentiment can provide unique and untapped insights. I'm also captivated by the social-networking aspect of blogs. Some have asked me about the "tech" backbone of BlogPulse. Essentially, BlogPulse employs multiple strategies to gather new blog postings every day from millions of weblogs which are extracted and transformed into XML and then full-text indexed along with some useful metadata. At this time, BlogPulse is aware of well between 4 - 5 million blogs, of which some 1.5 - 2 million blogs are "active", in that they've generated at least one new post in the past 30-60 days. The full-text search facility of BlogPulse searches only blog posts versus the full content of blog pages -- thus making it possible for users to find what other bloggers said about a topic without being inundated with useless and irrelevant results. We have applied our full advanced text mining technologies to analyze a large sample of blog posts everyday to determine trends in a completely automated setting:

-- "Phrase mining" using a background model of blog data identifies bursty phrases in blog postings, while "concept clustering" allows us to identify the key themes and stories of the day. Compared to others who have attempted to create so-called "word bursts", our technology is clearly superior because our toolkit includes many different phrase mining algorithms that are used in a pipeline to produce very readable phrases that indicate what is on top of the bloggers' mind on any given day.

-- "Entity extraction" technology spots people names in blog postings with over 95% accuracy. The system produces a list of "leaders" as well as "movers", which allows users to spot personalities that are increasing or decreasing in prominence in the blogosphere.

-- "Citation analysis" technology finds the top citations or links from blog postings every day. The top links are presented along with the contexts in which they were cited within blog postings.

We are only showing a very small set of our search, text mining and visualization capabilities on BlogPulse today. Stay tuned to our showcase on BlogPulse where we'll continually deliver new features and tools to get the most from the world of blogs.

Tech Notes: Two Challenges for Blog Search Paradigms

My name is Matt Hurst and I'm one of the many PhD's at Intelliseek's Applied Research Center. I'm also one of the architects of Intelliseek's search portal, BlogPulse. Blogs represent a class of online content that presents particular challanges to the current search paradigm used by engines like Google and Yahoo. The challenges provide key differentiation between the search giants and the up-and-coming blog only search engines.

First of all, blogs are very timely. The most visible blogs, which are by some measure the most important or most influencial, are often updated many times in one day. The content, particularly on those blogs commenting on political and other hot opinion topics, is in constant flux and searches that lead to posts that are no longer on topic for the search are simply not good enough. If I search for Barack Obama and Google leads me to a page with no mention of this rising political start, the engine hasn't done its job propertly. The data has shifted out from under them. The solution is to crawl more often and in a more strategic manner. This becomes a challange to those search engines which are not specificly blog search engines. By focusing on blogs, the number of pages (though increasing rapidly) is far below that of the entire web making this more timely crawls feasible. A win for blog specific engines.

Secondly, blogs have a simple natural unit which is not a web page. The posts of a blog - their natural unit - are accumulated on a page (in a variety of ways). A blog search engine must index these posts - and not the pages. The solution to this problem is to carry out document analysis on the blog page. Document analysis breaks down a document into constituent logical elements (in this case posts among others).
Traditional search engines again fail us here - and only a small number of blog engines have acheived this capability. The challenge for the search giants is that they would have to recognize which pages are blogs and which aren't. Again, by focusing on blogs only, the blog search engine skips this problem and can concentrate on blog post anlaysis.