As we all know, capturing a candid photo is always better than a posed shot. Blogs represent an opportunity to capture candid viewpoints about religion, politics, and even products, services, and the companies that produce them. "BuzzMetrics has created a panel of what it calls "word-of-mouth influencers," a list of thousands of bloggers, message-board posters and other people BuzzMetrics has deemed influential in the online community, in part by examining traffic numbers. By studying their online interaction, BuzzMetrics says it can give companies important information about how they are perceived by customers." -- VAUHINI VARA, WSJ Online Waypath (a product of ThinkTank23) used to have a Buzz-O-Meter - a way to graphically display the Blog buzz about any topic. I miss that service. Discovering what people are saying about your products and services is very useful, but doing something with that information is critical as well. We think secure Blogging and annotation services about the intelligence captured, is also a smart thing to be doing. At MyST Technology Partners we've experimented with interesting concepts that help companies identify competitive and business intelligence about things that happen on other sites. Not many people know this, but MyST is not just about Blogging. We do that well, especially for corporate users, but MyST includes powerful XML scripting services that allow us to capture and investigate product details found on other Web pages. PartnerWatch provides a simple solution for channel managers that want to know - "of my 600 resellers, which of them actually point to my Web content?". With a simple configuration, we are able to capture that information daily and provide a report that indicates which resellers are linking to your site and how many links they have. We can also look for references to whitepapers, demo executables, product names, and even misspelled company and product names. "Some companies, though, have been less successful in their attempts to find useful information in online chatter. Ford Motor Co.'s European unit last year hired a firm to help it watch the Web, but the trial soon ran into trouble: It was receiving information more rapidly than ever, but found that it couldn't act on the new data fast enough." Ironically, the same tools that we use to find useful information for BI and CI purposes, can be used to deal with information overload. Once we capture information, we provide change notification through RSS feeds. This provides a highly productive way for specific users (and roles) in the marketing organization to closely watch only the types of information relevant to their jobs. Given that our platform categorizes the information in narrow channels designed to focus on a specific task, intelligence workers are able to set their secure RSS subscriptions to bring them only the changes that are found in the last 24 hours. Market research using Blogs as the database is a great idea, but there are many ways to build your competitive and business intelligence warehouse with simple and effective tools. Secure Blogs and secure RSS feeds can help you manage the process of using the information. | 
