Tracking Microsoft Buzz with Blogs, Twitter, Bitly and Videos
Matthew Hurst writes:
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).
A great illustration that not every useful search application crawls the entire WWW.
It should crawl only as much as you need. The rest is just noise.