Tracking Microsoft Buzz with Blogs, Twitter, Bitly and Videos

Microsoft is an incredibly diverse company. I've just celebrated 5 years here and still don't have a full appreciation of the breadth and depth of products and innovation that the corporation generates. After BlogPulse was unplugged, I felt something of a hankering to continue to follow the buzz around Microsoft, partly as a way to better follow what the company is doing and how it is perceived in the online world.

I'm a big fan of TechMeme, but it has some challenges when it comes to tracking news and trends around a specific company. Firstly, I don't know the sources that are used and the ranking mechanisms in place, so it is hard to really understand quantitatively what it represents. Secondly, with limited real estate, while a big story may be happening for a company of interest, it can be crowded out by other events. Thirdly, I can't help but think it has a strong valley culture bias. Fourthly, it hasn't evolved much in the years that I've been visiting it.

So I've put together an experimental site called track // microsoft which follows a few blogs, clusters posts that are related and uses Bitly and Twitter data to rank the articles and clusters of stories. In doing this, I observed that many posts in the blogosphere about Microsoft would contain videos (be they of Windows 8 demos or the latest research leveraging the Kinect platform).

The site has three basic columns. The first contains established stories, represented by clusters of articles. The second represents a more timely view of posts. Both of these columns use Bitly and Twitter statistics to rank, with a bias to recency. The third column shows videos which have been embedded in posts multiple times.

Thus far, I find the stories and videos that surface here to be very interesting. This is where I first learned about:

• Microsoft's site for the new Hunger Games movie.
• The dynamics of Nokia's presence in the UK cell phone market.
• The release of the iPlayer on the Xbox (how cool is that!)

The nice thing about track // microsoft is that it should be easy to repurpose it to follow any topic - all you need is a list of feeds. I'm hoping to put together pages for taiko, skiing, Kauai, ...

Please take a look at track // microsoft and let me know what you think.

Comments

[Akash Mitra]

Hi Matthew!

I just stopped by to say I really liked "track // microsoft" - it works!
And I am curious to know a few more things about it...

You wrote -"... track // microsoft ... follows a few blogs, clusters posts that are related and uses Bitly and Twitter data to rank the articles and clusters of stories."

In the above paragraph, did you mean that it follows a fixed list of blogs that is supplied to it? Or does it actually automatically identifies the blogs that it "should" follow? Also how do you rank them? Do you sort of see the popularity of those blog posts in twitter / bitly? How exactly does your ranking work?

I was trying to build something of this sort for the BI community website http://www.dwbiconcepts.com , but my approach was to use Twitter API to first search for the trending keywords and then identify web posts around those keywords. Seems like your approach is to first cluster articles from a given list of blogs and then rank them based on twitter references. Is that correct?

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