Webnomena

I think that Technorati is a great service for bloggers and blog readers but not for businesses.

Technorati let you know who is the perceived authority. In most cases it is the real authority. So once you stumble upon a great blog and you would like to see if this is your findings or not, all that you need to do is to search for it in Technorati and then to check what this blog rank and authority are. The lower the rank and the higher the authority numbers is means that other people thinks that this blog is a valuable resource.

Lately I was trying to collect different kind of information to continue working on my “Stop looking at the blog and start looking at the blogger” series and I found that it is not easy to find what that I’m looking for.

What that I was looking for is the top X blogs (bloggers) in a given category and sub categories such as: technology (software, hardware, search engines, data mining etc..), sports, politics, business (endless sub categories in here) and more.

Why?

I personally need it for tracking progress of bloggers making the list of top authorities in their field.

But more important I think that marketer will need this information too.

If a marketer want to build relationship with the right blogger(s) that can help to convey their message to the relevant audience and influence a desired market segment, where will he start from? I’m not a marketer but it make sense to me that this effort should be concentrated in the right place.

Another case is for an entrepreneur trying to get on the radar of the right VCs. There could be more business cases in here that I don’t see yet.

The bottom line is getting the right entry point(s).

“Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand and I could lift the world.” Archimedes

Let me show you what that I mean. If you invest in the stock market you can get a ton of information. 

I was looking for something like this:

map of the market

You can clearly see the market share of each company within an industry and sector. You can find the leaders in each segment and follow their expansion/contraction. You can see new companies that enter the market and their growth. I don’s have the same view in the blogsphare.

Current blog search engine provides ranking and popularity across all categories, most will find tagged information and what is really hot at this moment. This is important for the “right now”, if you just open your computer but it is not helping professionals trying to build a processes to leverage Web 2.0 online marketing capabilities for building their campaigns.

Beside doing a lot of leg work (that I might end up doing for lack of better alternative), do you see a better way to automate this process?

I can see “Technorati for business” application with some tweaks.

Content Management

I see companies moving from traditional document authoring tools to using XML based format following the DITA standard. Breaking large books to small reusable modular text element.  These element can be referenced and mapped for different purposes using associated metadata information. Examples for document that can be generated from the same content are end user and online documentation, training material and web site. In addition to text this format allows adding content such as images, audio and video using references.

One hidden expense in maintaining documentation is ineffective translation. The main challenge is tracking changes. If there is no way to tell which parts were changed it forces the company to sends the entire document for translation over and over again. This inefficiency add significantly to the overall cost.

By using XML format and version control companies can reduce some of these costs. There are many Vendors that support DITA standard and I already wrote about one Software as a Service (SaaS) solution provider in here.

DocZone have additional advantages that can lower translation cost by using their server-based translation memory tool (see Translation memory).

Hosted Content and Collaboration Tools

I can see a win moving to hosted online collaboration tool such as pbwiki instead of using on-site wiki application installation. There are ton of collaboration tools out there. Some goes way beyond the basic wiki functionality but this is not what that make them appealing in my opinion. The fact that it frees company IT resources from the constant need to deal with back-up, maintenance and above all upgrade should be the motivation. Especially for small company with very limited IT resources. For few thousand dollars a year you get a good enough wiki functionality for up to 75 users.

I will be happy to hear about more ways to cut cost  from you. Small start-up companies can do a lot today to reduce IT expenses and dependencies. For instance utilizing online doc authoring services such as Google Docs or Zoho instead of the expensive MS Office suite.