Tools for Searching, Monitoring and Analyzing Blogs There are hundreds…

Tools for Searching, Monitoring
and Analyzing Blogs
There are hundreds of tools and services available to help companies gather and review blogs in an effort
to understand what is being said on the blogosphere at any given time and how it may impact their brand,
company, competitors and market. These tools range from free online web tools to expensive customized
research services. Depending on whether you are getting started with blogging and blog analysis or you
are already involved in the blogosphere and have very specific requirements, the best tool to use varies.

Marketers should keep in mind that the tools themselves are only as good as the content they analyze.
Most search and monitoring tools can access millions of blogs but they are not all accessing the same
set. The best approach for marketers on a budget is to use multiple tools to survey the blogosphere to get
a feel for the level of discussion on their company, products and competitors as well as the key issues
and topics that impact their market.

Once you have a feel for the level of discussion about your space, the next step is to join the online
conversation and start blogging. Even if you don't have a blog yet, you can comment on other blogs and
participate in important discussions with consumers, the media and thought leaders. The next step is to
create your own blog. There are many free and inexpensive blog creation and hosting services available.
Unlike corporate websites, blogs can be created in minutes and modified easily.

For marketers, joining the blogosphere as an active participant requires a regular commitment of time but
the rewards of understanding your customers better, connecting to new prospects and identifying new
business opportunities often far exceed the effort and cost involved. Whether you decide to create a blog
or not, all marketers should be analyzing blogs daily.

Provided below is a small list of tools from among the hundreds available to search, monitor and analyze
blogs. Cymfony welcomes comments and suggestions on this list ­ please send to cmo@cymfony.com.



Tools for Searching Blogs

PubSub http://www.pubsub.com

Unlike traditional search engines that store indexed news and blog content, PubSub is an ad-supported
matching service that allows users to enter terms to be matched against any new content created on the
16 million+ sources that PubSub watches. PubSub matches your terms against the new content and
notifies you when there is a match. PubSub is used by many marketers and product managers to track
mentions of their brands and competitors. As a free service, it provides a very useful competitive
intelligence tool for anyone who wants to keep a pulse on a diverse range of topics and companies.

Google Blog Search http://blogsearch.google.com/

Blog Search is a new Google search technology that is primarily focused on blogs. Any site that publishes
content via an RSS or Atom site feed can be searched by Google Blog Search. That includes news sites
as well as blogs in English and many other languages. The search interface is very easy to use but it's
important to use the "Advanced Search" option to limit content to filter searches by language, titles,
authors and more. When your results are returned, an additional link is provided that allows you to switch
between displaying the results with either the most relevant or the most recent results at the top.
Yahoo! Blog Search http://www.ysearchblog.com/

Yahoo! News now provides access to blogs as well as news. In addition to blog posts, they are providing
links to Flickr photos and My Web, which is a large grassroots media network. http://podcasts.yahoo.com/

Another new service from Yahoo! allows users to search podcast, which are self-published audio programs
often created by bloggers. You can download podcasts into your computer or MP3 player. You can also
subscribe to podcasts to quickly receive new episodes of programs when they are published.

PodScope http://www.podscope.com/

Podscope, is an online service from TVEyes that searches every word within a podcast using audio
indexing technology. TVEyes is a leader in broadcast search. This service is available free today in a beta
version.

Technorati http://www.technorati.com

Technorati is a real-time blog search engine that determines the relevance of a site by the number of
other sites that link to it. Technorati automatically receives notification from weblogs as soon as they are
updated, so it can track the thousands of updates per hour that occur in the blogosphere, and monitor the
communities (who's linking to whom) underlying these conversations. Technorati currently tracks over 19
million sites and over 1.6 billion links. Technorati is one of the oldest blog search engines with a massive
archive of historical blog posts. Technorati is very useful for marketers that want to understand how the
perception of products and issues has changed over time. While some links may be expired or irrelevant,
the tool provides a very useful starting point for performing blog research.

Technorati also uses tagging technology to organize blog content by a wide variety of categories such as
business topics, regions and technologies. Marketers can search for posts that are tagged to be included
in an existing category or create one of their own. Marketers can also tag their own posts so that they can
be easily found by Technorati users. This is useful to raise the visibility of your posts to new audiences.

IceRocket http://www.icerocket.com

IceRocket, is a new search engine providing new ways to find blog and news content. There are no ads
displayed on IceRocket results. IceRocket also provides several tools that help marketer's track links from
site to site, identify quick trends in online discussion and uncover current blog topics.

Feedster http://www.feedster.com

Feedster is a search engine and advertising network that indexes over 15 million syndicated feeds per
hour. This includes millions of blogs and over 75,000 professionally published news sources such as
CNET and The New York Times. Feedster searches for the most recently updated news and information
so the service is very useful for finding breaking news from both blogs and news services.


Tools for Monitoring/Analyzing Blogs
Bloglines http://www.bloglines.com

Bloglines is a free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, and blogs.
Most people use Bloglines as a blog aggregation tool to track updates from their favorite blog sites. This
can reduce the amount of time you need to spend searching blogs to see if there have been any updates.
The new posts are listed with links back to the original content. You can set up a Bloglines account for
free and start monitoring blogs and news immediately. Bloglines also provides recommendations of top
blogs to help you get started.
NewsGator http://www.newsgator.com

NewsGator Online is a free news aggregation service that feeds content from news and blogs into
Microsoft Outlook. If you spend a great deal of time using Outlook every day, this service can be very
useful for monitoring industry news and key blogs without leaving Outlook.

BlogSquirrel http://www.cyberalert.com/blogmonitoring.html

BlogSquirrel is a blog searching and clipping service from CyberAlert. BlogSquirrel's online services reach
over 5 million blogs each day. While the service is not free, many people like the idea of having a low-cost
service organize and search for mentions of their brands that can be combined into a Digital Clip Book
and delivered via email daily.

BlogPulse http://www.blogpulse.com

BlogPulse.com is a blog search engine by Intelliseek that also provides quick buzz tracking and trend
charting tools. Like Technorati, BlogPulse has access to historical blog mentions for the millions of blog
sites in its database. This tool is useful for a quick glimpse of online discussion trends, however it does
not filter out duplicate or irrelevant mentions to a level required for marketing research and analysis.
Therefore this tool is best used for a 20,000-foot view of the blogosphere.

While these tools are helpful for a high-level search of blog content, considerable work
is needed in order to find the nuggets of insight and ideas relevant to your brand. More
advanced tools, like Cymfony's Orchestra platform, use advanced text mining, natural
language processing, and analytics to categorizing and summarizing key topics. You
can find out more about Cymfony's technology and services at
www.cymfony.com/sol_what.asp.