Conversation Gap Wizard

Niall Cook, of Hill and Knowlton,  writes about using free online tools to study, among other things, the conversation gap. The end of his post has a form which asks for some simple data and creates trend graphs using BlogPulse' trending system. Pretty cool. I'll note, however, that the quality of results will vary greatly with respect to the ambiguity, etc.,  of terms. Looking for 'apple' will likely pick up mentions of the company, but also mentions of fruit.

Comments

[Anjo Anjewierden]

Matthew,

I'm sorry, but as long as BlogPulse does not even recognise plurals a discussion of whether apple refers to the company, the fruit (or the record company) is totally irrelevant. Niall phrased one of his queries as "mp3 players" (plural) vs. "walkman" (singular). Apparently he is ignorant of the fact that BlogPulse makes a distinction between plural and singular forms. He could have phrased the query as "mp3 player" vs. "walkmans" and the results would be different.

I really think it is a good idea to be honest about what BlogPulse does on the homepage such that users can take this into account.

Anjo.

[Niall Cook]

Anjo,

Although I agree it is not visible in the label used, I constructed the query to look for either the singular or the plural. I should have clarified that as a footnote.

But as Matthew says, the "quality" varies with ambiguity. That's why I think that a combination of search, analysis and synthesis is required in order to make sense of any data.

My objective was to show our clients - many of whom are not even aware that you can search blogs - what is out there, and frame it in a way they might understand.

Niall