Global Trend

New Tools Help Harness the Information Explosion

If you know what a “blog” is, you’re in the elite minority of Americans who are aware of this key source of information and insights. Only 38 percent of all Internet users know what a blog is, according to a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project released in January 2005.1

However, blogs are an important resource for businesses, and the new tools for tracking them will play a prominent role in marketing research for the rest of this decade. As we analyze this trend, we’ll explore what a blog is, trace the growth of blog creation and readership, explore the tools for exploiting them, and predict where this technology is headed.

If the number of requests for a definition is any indication, the word blog was the most popular and misunderstood term of 2004. It was the most looked-up word on Merriam-Webster’s dictionary Web site in 2004.

Simply put, a blog is a journal that a person posts on the Internet. It is typically updated one or more times each day.

The Drudge Report is one example of a blog [www.drudgereport.com]. Created by Matt Drudge, it provides news, scoops, and gossip, often before the mainstream press reports the same items.

Bloggers can make an impact on politics, business, and the economy. They “toppled Trent Lott as Senate majority leader, made a significant presidential candidate out of Howard Dean, spread the word about Jon Stewart’s appearance on CNN’s Crossfire, kept the Rathergate affair percolating, and triggered a stock market slide by prematurely announcing a [John] Kerry win in the 2004 presidential election,” according to a report in the Ventura County Star.2

Furthermore, companies like Microsoft, Dell, and Sun Microsystems encourage their employees to blog ? and to even criticize the companies where they work ? as long as they don’t disclose proprietary information or embarrass their employers. However, not every employee blog follows those rules. One Microsoft blogger was fired after he posted a photo of Macintosh computers being delivered to Microsoft. And a Delta Airlines flight attendant lost her job for illustrating her blog with revealing photos of herself that were taken on a Delta jet.

According to some experts, 15,000 new blogs are added to the Web each day. The Pew study revealed that 7 percent of the 120 million American adults who use the Internet have created a blog. That amounts to 8 million people. Blog creators tend to be well-educated, with 39 percent having college or graduate degrees, and 42 percent of them earn household incomes of more than $50,000.

Meanwhile, 27 percent of Internet users ? or 32 million Americans ? now read blogs. Their readership is growing rapidly, increasing by 58 percent from February 2004 to November 2004.

Interestingly, 5 percent of Internet users are now relying on RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and Web sites as it is posted on-line. As the Pew study reports, this finding suggests that RSS “is gaining an impressive foothold.”

RSS, which stands for Really Simple Syndication, is a new way to gather and distribute news and information from Web sites, including blogs. The user downloads the RSS aggregator, which is often free, and instructs it to subscribe to the RSS feeds from blogs, Web sites like CNN.com, and other sites that provide plenty of content.

According to Andy Carvin, [www.digitaldividenetwork.org] the director of the Digital Divide Network, RSS is written in the Internet coding language of XML, which is why RSS links are usually identified with a button labeled XML on Web pages.

As Carvin explains, “If a Web site publishes an RSS page, commonly known as an RSS ‘feed,’ this feed will contain summaries of all the recent articles posted on that site. For example, Yahoo News publishes news related to world headlines, national news, sports, etc. These you can all read by going to the Yahoo Web site. But they also publish RSS feeds for each of these subjects. Each RSS feed contains a summary of the most recent news stories posted.”

Bloggers often have their own RSS feed for articles that they post on their blogs.

RSS aggregators collect RSS feeds from hundreds, thousands, or even millions of blogs and other Web sites, and instantly organize them in a convenient format for you to read.

Among the RSS aggregators that you can use are My Yahoo, which you can customize on Yahoo’s Web site. Not only can you select from various features to display, such as news, sports, horoscopes, weather, and so on, but you can also choose the RSS feeds that you want to receive. Whenever you open the My Yahoo page you’ve created, you’ll see the latest content from the blogs, news sites, or other RSS feeds you’ve selected.

Another option is to use Feedster [www.feedster.com]. This site offers a search engine that you can use to search blogs and other Web pages that use RSS feeds to find specific content. You can also set it up to bring all of the RSS feeds you want to read to one place.

You can also download software that will aggregate RSS feeds for you. Carvin recommends Thunderbird, which is available at no charge from Mozilla [www.mozilla.org]. It retrieves RSS feeds from blogs and other Web sites and sorts them into folders just like incoming e-mail. Instead of going to each individual site and scanning the headlines for information that might interest you, Thunderbird allows you to track the latest content in your folders.

Yet another tool is FeedDemon [www.bradsoft.com/feeddemon], which comes pre-configured with dozens of popular feeds so you can start using it right away. It displays new items from dozens of sites in a single Web page for quick access, while also collecting stories that contain specific words or phrases you’ve selected, so you don’t have to search for the articles that are most relevant to you.

One of the most powerful tools is called PubSub [www.pubsub.com]. It monitors millions of Web sites and delivers RSS feeds that match users’ requests in real time. PubSub claims that it tracks more than 6.5 million blogs, 50,000 Usenet newsgroups, all SEC/EDGAR filings, as well as press releases from major wire services, and FAA airport delays, to instantly alert users whenever items of interest appear.

Looking ahead, we offer the following three forecasts:

First, blogs will emerge as a vital source of marketing insights and competitor intelligence. Companies that want to know what consumers really think of a new product launch, target customers’ reactions to the latest ad campaign, or the public’s response to a corporate scandal will find that postings in on-line diaries will give them instant access to raw opinions that are not influenced by any of the biases that occur in focus groups. Similarly, companies that set up RSS aggregators to collect items about their competitors will gather clues to those companies’ strategic moves, labor problems, plant closings, and new store locations from blogs written by their employees, their customers, and the residents of communities where they do business.

Second, the RSS aggregator tools will undergo a consolidation. Just as many Internet search engines of five years ago have disappeared, we expect that some of today’s RSS tools will merge with each other or will be overshadowed by superior offerings.

Third, the winning business model will be one that goes beyond aggregation to interpretation. It’s important to realize that the new tools, such as Feedster and PubSub, do not analyze the information from RSS feeds for you. They simply bring the information to your attention very quickly, in an efficient and convenient format. To add real value, a business will need to develop a mechanism that makes sense of the raw data that it collects from blogs and news sites.

References List :
1. To access the Pew Internet & American Life Projects study on blogging, visit their website at:www.pewinternet.org/pdfs/PIP_blogging_data.pdf2. Ventura County Star, January 10, 2005, “To Blog or Not to Blog? Thats the ‘05 Question,” by Beverly Kelley. ⓒ Copyright 2005 by E.W. Scripps Company. All rights reserved.