I had a podcast today with Tom Raftery, we mainly discussed the evolving requirement for tracking user generated media (blogs, UseNet) and how much this was on the radar of European companies. Definitely worth a listen :) He has a lot of knowledge around podcasting, blogging and web 2.0, so if anyone wants to get up to speed on those areas just listening to his last 5-10 podcasts will certainly help…

I was asked recently by a market research journalist, why blog tracking is relevant for business. Blogs are now on most companies’ radars, but often the discussion is on how they can use blogs as a dissemination tool, not on how they can be used to gain customer insights. There is no question that the numbers are increasing (30 million and doubling every year) For Attentio, this is our business and blogs are only one example of people generated content (UseNet and consumer review sites are very important too), but here is why we think blogs are specifically interesting.

1. Search engine relevance: If you search about an issue, a product, or company it is likely a blog will figure highly in the results i.e. in page 1 or 2. This means the content of a blog will have a large audience of search users. My mother reads about a Gucci handbag in a blog, a patient reads about a new drug in a blog, a person looking to buy a new computer reads about Dell customer service issue in Jeff Jarvis’s blog etc.

2. Connectedness: Bloggers link to other bloggers. Tools like track-back add to this connectedness and often it is possible to follow where an issue was first discussed and how it spread through this network.

3. Content and set up: Blogs are easy to set up and have no editor. There is nothing to stop anyone creating a blog and writing about widely discussed issue or niche topics that interest them. In a sense they can take advantage of the “Long tail” with micro-communities of interested people or post about more mainstream topics.

4. Predictability: If an increasing number of bloggers are talking about a specific product and the sentiment is positive, this can translate into more sales or at least more enquiries. This is product and influence dependent, but there are plenty of case examples. The corollary of negative sentiment also applies.

Attentio can help give perspective on what the buzz around blogs means; to do this we use technology, methodology and standard reporting. A good way to start seeing if this is relevant for your company is by checking Technorati or Google blog search and see how frequently people post on a specific area of interest. Then check out Google Groups and do the same for discussion forums. If the numbers are large, then it might be worth paying professionals to do the analytics work…

For more information on this topic there is a great article from Business Week on the impact of blogs, also a post on this blog from November has a good number of sites to go to.

I’m Simon McDermott, a co-founder of Attentio and previously did my blogging from simonmcdermott.com. I have put a few of these previous posts in the Attentio blog because the subject material is around the area of blog tracking, web 2.0 and the change in relationship between company and customer. I want to write in future about what makes this burgeoning industry special, why organisations and individuals can benefit from this space and of course other interesting trivia (I of course determine what is interesting…). Other members of the team and advisors will also give their views and opinions on Attentio’s space and we look forward to a great discussion. 

This: Yahoo! User Interface Library has to be the beginning of the future of UIs on the web. Back in the old days when I used to program with the MFC, the two things I loved about Microsoft’s ubiquity were that I had a choice of ready-to-use controls/widgets/components at my fingertips that I could easily stick into my application to give it complex behaviour and the fact that if I chose to thus stick, everyone knew how to use it. Java came along (ignoring the disastrous AWT) and sort of made it work (again). Mostly the behaviour was what you expected, but then sometimes. Ah, sometimes. The early days of the web were OK - it was just tables after all. But then the fatal promise of Javascript and DHTML loomed. Suddenly it was roll-your-own time again. And it still is. Years and years later.

I can’t begin to describe how tired I am as a user of struggling with yet another calendar widget on yet another budget travel site. Is it going to pop up with a month view? Will it show me the current date? Will it insert the date if I click it? Or is it just advisory, showing me which days of the week my 1 euro flight is really available on (none).

It’s not that I blame the poor UI developers. The first time you get lumbered with working on a webapp with complex client-side behaviour, you discover that nobody is out there to help you. Or rather everyone is… You want to add a tree control? MFC/Java/.NET apps?, TCL/TK? - no problem. Webapp - take a look at Webmonkey, they have something interesting. It sort of works. Then there’s a bunch of developers with really neat open source controls - how about them? Or how about ASP.NET, Struts, Tapestry…? Hang on, I just wanted a tree I could click and now I have to use a whole framework? (Yes I realize that MFC required a whole OS, but somehow that didn’t feel as bad as a framework. The OS was just kind of there hanging around doing nothing after all.) I’m back in UI pre-history, so what will I do? Take something that sort of works and adapt it so it does. YAWPUS. Yet another widget for the poor users to struggle with.

What I would dearly love to see is industry heavyweights getting together, feeling the love, knocking out some standard components that are so great that UI developers will flock to use them, thus taking the weight off my brain when all I want to do is buy cheap tickets. So as Nat on O’Reilly Radar said “Kudos to Yahoo!”.