Monitoring the Blogosphere

1
Monitoring the Blogosphere

• Trevor Cook
• September 2005

2
Think .

• Distributed media
• Many-to-many publishing
• Communities and conversations
• PR as conversations
• PR with real-time feedback
• PR without a media gateway

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Needles and haystacks

• 14.3 million blogs, 1.3 billion links, doubling
  every 5 months
• 80k blogs created everyday, 55 still posting
  after 3 months, 13 update at least weekly
• 10.4 posts per second, 900k each day

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Blog Buzz

• McDonalds 744 posts per day compared to Burger
  King, 573
• Telstra 62, Optus 12

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Aussie pollies
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RSS news aggregators

• Dave Winer (b. 1955) software pioneer, creating
  some of the first outliners, content management
  systems, and weblog tools.
• He's also the author of Scripting News, one of
  the first weblogs.
• In 1995, Winer, along with Microsoft,
  co-developed the protocol XML-RPC
• Very simple protocol, the entire description can
  be printed on two pages of paper.

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RSS News Aggregators
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The benefits of RSS

• Fast much easier than checking on sites to see
  whats new
• Breadth -- headlines from the web sources you
  care about are consolidated
• Organization -- sources can be displayed in the
  categories that suit you
• Productivity -- email newsletter subscriptions
  and unruly bookmarks can lead to clutter and
  overload.
• Relationships easier for you and the website
  host to stay in touch

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Feeds mean more information
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Bloglines
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Traditional searching

• Order of importance
• Measures popularity (number of links the
  importance of those links)
• Blogs are search engine friendly (links and easy
  to index)
• About half of visitors to blogs arrive through
  searching on Google, Yahoo, MSN etc
• problems
• blog OR weblog

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Google page ranking
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Search engines favour blogs change the business
model

• Permalinks every post has a separate URL
• Blogs link to each other much more than websites
• The long tail everything on sale all the time

14
Dell service problems
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Converting searches to feeds
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Live searching

• New services to monitor blogs
• Chronological rather than order of importance
• Fast - technorati claims less than a 5 minute
  average delay
• Many bloggers use tags to make it easy for people
  to follow a topic thread

17
Technorati
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Following the trends - Daypop
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Whats happening right now
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Social bookmarking
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What does it all mean for PR?
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Learn More

• "Corporate Engagement" - comments on the world
  of communication - http//trevorcook.typepad.com
• "Blogging and Podcasting in Australia" -
  http//trevorcook.typepad.com/newvoices
• Headlines from PR blogs - http//groups.blogdigger
  .com/groups.jsp?id85
• The NewPR Wiki - http//www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwi
  ki.php
• Global PR Blog Week 2.0 - 19 to 23 September -
  http//www.thenewpr.com/wiki/pmwiki.php/PRBlogWeek
  2/HomePage
• For Immediate Release - PR podcast -
  http//www.forimmediaterelease.biz/