Steve Rubel is really on a roll with his recent post about searching not just the blogosphere, but other social media as well. One thing he is missing, however, is that it is not just as simple as aggregating all this data in one place. Mixing results from blogs, boards, etc is going to create more of a mess than a solution. For example, providing a relevance ranking that works with all these spaces at once is near to impossible unless one uses simple measures like time. Consequently, one needs to consider interfaces that give universal access but which present the results in paritions in some manner, or which make the relationships explicit.
Aggregating, searching and analyzing this data has been the bread-and-butter of life at BuzzMetrics, Umbria, Cymfony and others for many years now. Another point that is important to consider is the boundary between consumer facing tools and enterprise tools. There were a number of interesting discussions at the recent AAAI Symposium on weblog analysis concerning how consumer facing tools could surface capabilities which have been around in the enterprise space for a long time. We are seeing some of that already (BlogPulse' trend search - cloned by IceRocket and Technorati, OpinMind's opinion search, BlogPulse' person name mining, popular link mining on most sites, etc). The big question is, what level of sophistication belongs in the consumer space? The future will be determined not so much by capabilities but by business strategy and UI considerations.
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