Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

IBM Announces "Blog-Spotting" Software

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the keeping-tabs-on-public-opinion dept.

notesdude writes to tell us InternetNews is reporting that IBM has announced new "Blog-Spotting" software that will allow the monitoring of blogs, wikis, news feeds, consumer review sites, newsgroups, and other community-generated content. From the article: "People can share and spread opinions faster than ever before and that's accelerated the impact of public opinion on businesses"

2 of 118 comments (clear)

  1. Evolution of software and the web by Kelson · · Score: 5, Informative

    This looks like an extension of existing "brand watching" programs that have been around for a year or two. The main difference appears to be automation. AFAIK, existing programs have used some sort of search to find references to a brand, and then humans have looked at the newsgroup/forum/blog/whatever posts to determine the level of positive/negative commentary, look for useful information (or for potential defamation), etc. IBM's main addition seems to be the software to analyze it all.

    Actually, this is probably a lot easier with blogs than with forums, since so many blogs provide RSS or ATOM feeds and there's a huge feed ping/search/index infrastructure in place with sites ranging from Ping-o-Matic to Syndic8 to Feedster and Technorati. So the search part is practically off-the-shelf.

  2. Re:New? by Jerry+Coffin · · Score: 4, Informative
    Okay, I went through TFA very quickly, but how does this differ from a simple RSS feed?

    RSS requires a source that provides the RSS feed. Some RSS aggregators do screen-scraping and such to aggregate data from various sources that don't directly support RSS. Most of these, however, need to know quite a bit about a specific non-RSS web site and how it formats its data before they can do much with it.

    The idea here seems to be for the tool to do a search to find all the blogs (and maybe web sites in general) that cover your chosen subject matter, and then have enough "smarts" to do screen-scraping (or something on that order) to provide you with an aggregation on all of them without requiring a lot of prior knowledge about the site and its formatting.

    --
    The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

    --
    The universe is a figment of its own imagination.