The news of tomorrow - today
28. May 2008 – 17:42 by Bengt FeilNo matter if you are a company, a journalist, a politician or a curious citizen – you certainly are interested in knowing which topics will be relevant tomorrow. The reasons for that may vary from the wish to have a competitive advantage to pure interest in a subject.
To reach this goal it seems to be helpful to use a number of tools that make it possible to identify those topics and issues that have not yet reached the awareness of the mainstream. The internet does provide a variety of tools which can help achieving that very well especially if a certain field of interest has to be monitored. I will talk about a few of these tools in this text.
The most common starting point for monitoring a field of interest is the blogosphere. A number of search engines, like for example Google blogsearch and Technorati, help to gain an overview about what is discussed in the blogosphere right now. If the goal is to monitor a topic over a longer period of time it may be useful to subscribe to the most relevant blog about the topic via RSS. One hint: The search results of Google blogsearch are also provided as an RSS feed which is dynamically updated.
Normal search engines provide excellent information about all kinds of subjects. But you need to use them actively which may hinder to implement an efficient monitoring process. This problem is solved by so called alerts which inform you via email or RSS if a new search result for any given term was index by the search engine. Google, Yahoo and MSN offer such services.
Twitter and other microblogging services are relatively new in the field of online communication but gain followers rapidly. These tools do allow users to send out short messages in a fast and easy way to the public. As these messages are public they can be searched by tools like Tweetscan. This special search engine does provide all Twitter posts concerning the search terms and lets the user subscribe to these dynamic result via RSS. Twitscoop on the other hand provides a general overview of the hot topics on Twitter at any given point of time. Perhaps this tool will allow a more specific overview for example about the field of politics later on in its development process.
The last group of applications I want to mention are the social bookmarking services. These websites allow users to share, rank and discuss their bookmarks. DIGG.com for example uses a user driven ranking system that identifies the most “interesting” websites and stories. DIGG also categorizes these links so that the ranking can be seen for field like politics and technology separately.
All of the mentioned websites and tools can be combined with for example Yahoo Pipes to form one tool to monitor a certain topic on the web. I will discuss the Yahoo Pipes service and its sister in another post on this blog.
Tags: blogosphere, digg, technorati, Twitter, yahoo pipes
6 Responses to “The news of tomorrow - today”
By Julia on May 29, 2008
Thanks for the terrific overview Bengt. My team and I have found it extremely useful.
Sometimes when we work so closely in the field, we assume that everyone is familar with all the tools that are out there, and that the tools themselves are easy to grasp and use. Unfortunately, this is not always the case!
We have recently found ourselves defeated at 21c in our attempt to use the BBC RSS feed! An embarassing admission - but indicative I think of the need to remind ourselves of the need to step back and think through the means to achieve widespread adoption of new tools.
An outstanding Estonian expert on the Internet recently made a compelling case that most people adopt new technologies and overcome useage problems through peer-to-peer mentoring. Pep-Net is off to a great start in this regard, as we’re now looking into using Google blogosphere and Yahoo Pipes!
By Bengt Feil on May 29, 2008
You are right about the fact that people working with this stuff everyday sometimes forget that most of the people do not use such tools.
Therefore it´s nice to try to write about it in plain english from time to time.
By Dan Jellinek on Jun 5, 2008
Yes, this is a useful overview.
Does anyone find Twitter very useful though?
I suspect it may be useful for some things, for example if there is a major confernce where a lot of people are ‘twittering’ and one cannot attend oneself. But is there much purpose in following a load of people’s twitterings generally? Isn;t it easier to just get RSS feeds from their proper blogs? And how do you work out who to follow? Otherwise you will end up following thousands of people… or just ignoring it.
I am registered on Twitter and have the people I follow combined into an RSS feed but I hardly ever look at it.
I know new technologies generally do have a place but I’m yet to work out what it is for Twitter, in a work context anyway.
By Bengt Feil on Jun 5, 2008
I find it extremly useful to keep in touch with the people which are not quite/or yet in my instant messager list.
The main difference may be the fact that Twitter message are mostly open in the public.
By Julia on Jun 10, 2008
I must admit that I have not really gotten than hang of twitter…. Bengt maybe you could ‘Twitter’ us all at Pep_Net to get us kick started???
By Bengt Feil on Jun 10, 2008
The funny thing about Twitter and microblogging in general is that you do not get it before you start using it. I had the same experience. Just give it a try and you will see that the added value in information and social interaction is worth the time you spend.