Cymfony's Influence 2.0

Cymfony and Sphere -- a perfect pair!

Cymfony and Sphere share the same vision that traditional and social media are converging. We're really excited about our partnership!

Sphere is the hot new blog search engine that is getting rave reviews. They have great relevance scoring technology and great spam detection. If you haven't used them, check it out. I think you'll really like the results you get.

You also have to try their "bookmarklet" called Sphere It! Download it onto your toolbar, go to a news article, click it and it brings up the relevant blogs to that article. Or go to Time.com, who has already embedded Sphere It! at the beginning of top stories.

Cymfony innovated the monitoring and measurement platform that combines both traditional and social media content, so Sphere is a great partner for us. We'll use this relationship to develop even more sophisticated ways to track how the traditional and social media world influence each other -- and help our clients track the influence they are having on the market.

PS. Sorry to have "gone dark" on you for the last two weeks. This is the first of several exciting things we've been working on. You'll see more over the next couple of weeks....

blogs social media partnerships

Tools for Searching, Monitoring and Analyzing Blogs

Cymfony's Julie Woods recently spoke at a Boston-based conference called "The Pulse of Technology" for local small to mid-size businesses.  She was asked to talk about how companies of this size were using blogs.  Realizing that more than half of the attendees were not going to be familiar with blogging, Julie and I decided to start with the basics and pulled together a hand out for the attendees entitled "Tools for Searching, Monitoring and Analyzing Blogs."  Based on a number of conversations we've had this year, there still seems to be confusion around the different tools and services used for searching blogs vs. creating blogs vs. monitoring/analyzing blogs (and other types of user created content for that matter) so I thought I share a high level portion of the hand out that includes some of the hundreds of tools now available.

Tools for Searching Blogs

• PubSub - Unlike traditional search engines that store indexed news and blog content, PubSub is an ad-supported matching service that allows users to enter terms to be matched against any new content created on the 16 million+ sources that PubSub watches. PubSub matches your terms against the new content and notifies you when there is a match. PubSub is used by many marketers and product managers to track mentions of their brands and competitors. As a free service, it provides a very useful competitive intelligence tool for anyone who wants to keep a pulse on a diverse range of topics and companies.
• Google Blog Search - is a newer Google search technology that is primarily focused on blogs. Any site that publishes content via an RSS or Atom site feed can be searched by Google Blog Search. That includes news sites as well as blogs in English and many other languages. The search interface is very easy to use but it’s important to use the “Advanced Search” option to limit content to filter searches by language, titles, authors and more. When your results are returned, an additional link is provided that allows you to switch between displaying the results with either the most relevant or the most recent results at the top.
• Yahoo! Blog Search - Yahoo! News now provides access to blogs as well as news. In addition to blog posts, they are providing links to Flickr photos and My Web, which is a large grassroots media network. Another new service from Yahoo! allows users to search podcast, which are self-published audio programs often created by bloggers. You can download podcasts into your computer or MP3 player. You can also subscribe to podcasts to quickly receive new episodes of programs when they are published.
• Podscope, is an online service from TVEyes that searches every word within a podcast using audio indexing technology. TVEyes is a leader in broadcast search. This service is available free today in a beta version.
• Technorati is a real-time blog search engine that determines the relevance of a site by the number of other sites that link to it. Technorati automatically receives notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated, so it can track the thousands of updates per hour that occur in the blogosphere, and monitor the communities (who's linking to whom) underlying these conversations. Technorati currently tracks over 23.9 million sites and over 1.8 billion links. Technorati is one of the oldest blog search engines with a massive archive of historical blog posts. Technorati is very useful for marketers that want to understand how the perception of products and issues has changed over time. While some links may be expired or irrelevant (and now spam blogs have become an issue), the tool provides a very useful starting point for performing blog research.
• IceRocket  - is a search engine providing new ways for to find blog and news content. There are no ads displayed on IceRocket results. IceRocket also provides several tools that help marketer’s track links from site to site, identify quick trends in online discussion and uncover current blog topics.
• Feedster is a search engine and advertising network that indexes over 19 million syndicated feeds per hour. This includes millions of blogs and over 75,000 professionally published news sources such as CNET and The New York Times. Feedster searches for the most recently updated news and information so the service is very useful for finding breaking news from both blogs and news services.

Tools for Creating Blogs

• Blogger is a free blogging service owned by Google. Blogger provides templates to help you quickly set up a blog and share it with others. As one of the first blogging services, there are millions of Blogger sites but many are not updated actively. However, many individual bloggers have started with Blogger as their first blog-hosting platform.
• LiveJournal from SixApart is a free blogging service for creating personal journals. The service hosts over 2 million journals. According to SixApart, LiveJournal's innovations include friend pages -- pages that enable users to easily view the recent journal updates of their LiveJournal friends. Additionally, with LiveJournal, users can have custom control over who can view their journal posts as well as join interest-based communities. LiveJournal is a good service for people who want to start blogging with friends about everyday topics. 
• Typepad is another personal weblogging service from Six Apart that is used by many companies as well. Typepad allows you to create a blog for yourself or to share. Blogs can take on any form from personal journals to corporate blogs with multiple authors. You can easily set up a Typepad account for free. For a small fee, Typepad provides a professional edition that allows you to have more control over design elements of your blog as well as comments and other features. The Typepad website also provides many useful links to resources about blogs and blogging.
• Movable Type - Also from Six Apart is a blog service called Movable Type that provides more advanced site design and development capabilities. For instance, Movable Type has the ability to store entries in a SQL database or create applications to solicit and receive input from visitors. Movable Type is a good option for marketers who have multiple audiences and blogs to support however it requires more advanced technical knowledge for installation and configuration.
• WordPress is a semantic personal publishing platform that has a reputation for being very easy to work with for developers of more sophisticated blogs. In addition, WordPress provides many useful features for customizing your blog as well as managing comment spam that can be a huge problem. WordPress is a free service, however you can donate both money and time to assist with hosting, documentation development and other costs of supporting the service.

Tools for Monitoring/Analyzing Blogs

• Bloglines is a free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, and blogs. Most people use Bloglines as a blog aggregation tool to track updates from their favorite blog sites. This can reduce the amount of time you need to spend searching blogs to see if there have been any updates. The new posts are listed with links back to the original content. You can set up a Bloglines account for free and start monitoring blogs and news immediately. Bloglines also provides recommendations of top blogs to help you get started.
• NewsGator Online is a free news aggregation service that feeds content from news and blogs into Microsoft Outlook. If you spend a great deal of time using Outlook every day, this service can be very useful for monitoring industry news and key blogs without leaving Outlook.
• BlogSquirrel is a blog searching and clipping service from CyberAlert. BlogSquirrel’s online services reach over 5 million blogs each day. While the service is not free, many people like the idea of having a low-cost service organize and search for a set of mentions of their brands that can be combined into a Digital Clip Book and delivered via email daily.
• BlogPulse is a blog search engine by Intelliseek that also provides quick buzz tracking and trend charting tools. Like Technorati, BlogPulse has access to historical blog mentions for the millions of blog sites they have access to. This tool is useful for a quick glimpse of online discussion trends however it does not filter out duplicate or irrelevant mentions to a level required for marketing research and analysis.
• Memeorandum is a specialized news and blog search aggregator focused on politics and technology. It has a very clean user interface similar to Google News that shows hot topics and related posts grouped together. You can even choose to view related discussions on topics.  This tool can be useful to marketers who need to know what the hot topics are in politics, current affairs and technology at any given moment. It leverages many of the other blog and news search tools to gather content.
• Orchestra - Cymfony has been providing media analysis solutions to Fortune 2000 clients for several years. We started integrating blog content into an automated and custom research solutions in 2004. Because of the tremendous impact of blogs on journalists and traditional media, the firm now offers an integrated media analysis dashboard application that automatically monitors and analyzes mainstream media (MSM) as well as blogs, usenet groups, online forums and other forms of social and consumer-generated media (CGM) under one converged Web-based service platform. Cymfony also provides guidance from experts on the blogosphere to assist companies and agencies with blog analysis strategy, product launches, event analysis, reputation monitoring and customized research. Large corporations and agencies as well as medium-sized companies with highly visible brands are the most common users of Cymfony’s products and services.

NOTE:  There are certainly more tools and services available in each of these catagories.  This is just a general list and resource to help get started.

blog analysis, consumer generated media, blog marketing, blog monitoring

New Models in the News

Today there were several interesting articles and posts about new models for news and communications. In his blog, Jeff Jarvis mentioned that The American Press Institute project to find new business models for newspapers . I agree wholeheartedly with him when he says “it’s not about new models for newspapers; it’s about new models for news.”

As US news consumers are moving away from printed newspapers, the news business needs to find a way to continue to be relevant to their readers while finding a way to make money. MarketingVox points out a Nielsen/NetRatings report that websites of US newspapers have increased readership by an annual rate of 11%. This trend may continue to grow quickly as 22% of readers prefer online editions. A large number still prefer print, however the trends can’t be ignored. While online users are used to free access to news supported by Ads, many still pay for their local paper just to see what’s happening in their town. As more and more local community sites such as Bayosphere emerge, it will be interesting to see how quickly local newspaper sales are impacted. I personally prefer to read local newspapers in print just to get a feel for what's going on in my town and area. Only a small portion of the top news information is available online, yet on any given day, I usually want to see a different bit of local information from politics to highschool sports to event times or even local ads. As long as newspapers keep providing useful information to consumers (like me) - I will keep buying print media.

Speaking of new models in the news, the World Summit on the Information Society has been the center of discussion around the US controlled domain name registration model.

There has been growing concern across the Internet that the current domain name system might change driven by countries such as China, Iran and Brazil that want to control and restrict access to the Internet. But as Wired reported late last night, a last minute agreement was reached before the opening of the World Summit on the Information Society in Tunis today. The good news is that there will be a U.N.-sponsored global forum to explore problems like spam and cybercrime. The bad news is that many attendees of the event are not convinced that much progress will really be made in terms of free speech and access in third-world countries. Read John Palfrey’s reporting from the summit for more information on the Tunis experience.

Technorati tags: newspapers, business, media

Looking for the Default Blog Search Engine

"The race is on to become the Google of blogs."  Well, no surprises here and I'd suspect that most people reading this blog would agree.  Nevertheless, I thought I'd share since the WSJ.com has kindly aggregated some blog search engines in a recent article written by Vauhini Vara entitled "New Search Engines Help Users Find Blogs".  Although no real winners emerge in the article, Vara does a decent job of describing some of the subtle content differences of the listed providers including Technorati, IceRocket, Feedster, Daypop and Bloglines.  The article also offers a nice visual to illustrate what sets the engines apart.  I'm not going to bash the article but I was extremely surprised not to see PubSub mentioned in the piece.  PubSub is doing some innovative things around matching and prospective search.

Basically from what I know Google, Yahoo, MSN, Technorati, BlogPulse, IceRocket, etc. are all retrospective search tools, meaning they take your query and answer it with historical information - what's already out there.  PubSub is a prospective matching engine, meaning it's only concerned with information you want to be alerted to from this very moment forward.  I'm by no means the expert here just really fascinated with what PubSub is doing. 

Since most of the new search engines are less than a year old, it will be interesting to watch how all this plays out. 

More Content Options for Clients

In a press release this week, Cymfony announced a new partnership with Moreover Technologies.  Since the release we've been asked by a few analysts and clients what this means, specifically if Cymfony users can pick and choose whether they can get LexisNexis, Dialog or Moreover content or if they only select content by publication or source?  To answer that question for all, Cymfony users can pick a particular content provider or they can rely on Cymfony's recommendation for the best options.

When we start working with a client, we assess the content coverage of multiple vendors to recommend the optimal content solution for the type of media analysis the client wants.  This often means that we recommend one primary content provider and supplemental providers for  additional Internet, broadcast or hard-to-get scanned content.  No single vendor has 100% coverage of everything.  Some of our clients have pre-existing relationships with content providers and prefer to leverage those.  However, other client prefer that Cymfony provide a complete solution including the content bundled into the application.  Whatever option the client chooses, Cymfony does all the content analysis and backend integration work with all content providers.