The more I think about Intelliseek, the more I think they'll either try to muscle Technorati out of their market or they'll buy 'em.
Intelliseek's BlogPulse Conversation Tracker is the sort of tool that I expected Technorati to build last year. In fact, I've joked about trying to build it myself using their API. (Could I sell it to them if I did?)
And the BlogPulse Trend Search is kinda cool too. Just for kicks, I did a Trend Search on the terms Yahoo, Google, and MSN.
If Intelliseek can provide a killer self-serve reporting and alerting system for business customers of all sizes, where does that leave Technorati in terms of paying customers?
I'm not saying Technorati is dead in the water--not by a long shot. But seeing a company like Intelliseek get serious about this tells you there's likely a big demand for such services. And I thought that was a market Technorati wanted a big piece of too.
This will be interesting to watch.
Update: As I just mentioned to friend via IM: "You can play with this for hours. It's like Alexa... for blogs."
Posted by jzawodn at April 04, 2005 12:21 PM
I'm convinced that one of the major applications yet to be developed that enterprise customers would pay money for is an effective way to find out what people are saying about them online.
Last fall I had an opportunity to see a presentation by IBM Research which gave some insight into things they're working on in this area. I don't have an electronic copy of the presentation, but this article covers a lot of the same topics as the presentation. The idea is to allow companies to sense and interpret small ripples in large sources of unstructured & structured data so they can make rapid business decisions ahead of their competition.
In other words - see what the blogosphere is saying about them.
It's cool stuff, but I'm totally prejudiced -- I invented the technology that Intelliseek bought from Opion, my previous startup, to do a lot of this kind of stuff (blogs didn't exist then, of course). Blogs are a bit harder to analyze than more traditional discussion venues intelligently because they are less of a conversation than a mailing list, newsgroup, web board, etc.
I'm curious to hear what problems other people think this kind of analysis could solve, since I'm still working on the same sort of thing.
There's a blog aggregation site that's just getting started (only been up for a few days) that ranks posts by their popularity over time:
It looks like it could be interesting as it grows...but it's still fun to play with as-is.
Oh YAY!!!! BlogPulse Search may be a very useful tool for me. Thanks for the link.
Why would Intelliseek (a b2b company) invest in a b2c company?
Nick, congratulations for your software. We "invented" similar visualisations techniques but only taxonomy maps are available for public users in our site. Index curves (among others) are available for our corporate clients.
Jeff, I am curious to see how WebFountain will pay off the huge investment that IBM has done till now.
About the only blogging software firms will be paying for in the next decade is spyware to report employees who waste company time yapping about irrelevant crap that contrary to popular thinking does not contribute to some great ecosystem of essential thought.
In ten years having a live unrestricted web connection at your desk will be as common as having cable tv at your desk. Meaning, FORGET IT.
