I’ve been working on a project for my classes and now wonder what value this may have in the business blogging world.
See an example of one I’ve created to expose students to various writers on the Web. Writers :: Combined posts of various writers on the net. The blog includes excerpts from various “Journalism, Copywriters, Direct Marketing, Speechwriters, PR, (and) Marcom” authors.
Aggregator blogs.
The aggregator is like a harvester or collector. It goes out, automatically, and takes excerpts from other blogs or news sites with RSS feeds. Then, those excerpts are automatically posted in the new blog. That is what the “Writers” blog does. It goes out to the eleven blogs listed under “Writer Post Archives” or “About Each Author/Site” and then republishes those excerpts in the “Writers” blog.
With the rising adoption of RSS (and the conversations we’ve had about it here), I wonder, “Does this type of blog show promise for some business sites? Intranet? Extranet?”
Consider this possible integration. You have a travel agency. Using tools like Yahoo! News - RSS to create custom feeds of news articles by “your search term(s)” and target particular countries or regions. The blog then becomes one linked section of your site.
The downside? Some news may lead to competitors. But, is that bad? Comparisons. Transparency. Would this not exhibit a confidence in your products/services?
A more practical application might be for an internal/intranet blog for you and/or your employees. Password protected from the outside, you custom build your tracked feeds so you can keep up on the latest news and activities of your competitors - new industry trends/developments. Since it is internal, you could enable the ‘comments’ function of a blog and have running discussions among teams working on a particular project. Then, your employees track the ‘comments RSS feed’ of the blog with one simple link (read through any RSS reader) - tracking numerous articles and comments - and you have a great research/brainstorming tool. Or, do you?
Or, to just read and follow customized feeds, a “Feed on Feeds” application might work best. It could still be internal/intranet. See this implementation I created sampling Writer Blogs and Writer Resources. A frames view layout is also available.
The upside of both these options is that the software platforms I used are opensource. Free. Use WordPress or Feed on Feeds. This could be good for a small one-person PR shop to use as one more tool / tactic to offer a client. I think these things - blogs and sites of many kinds - have ‘billable’ potential. But, how much, I don’t know.
So, what do you think? Any applications you can see for this type of ‘business blog’ add-on? There are so many questions spinning in my mind on this. Are any of you developers including this kind of customization/service for your clients? You needn’t name ‘names’. 
By the way, thanks to Bill French for help in starting me on this ‘quest’ for another way to press blogs and CMS into service. I always find myself thinking how Bill, Dee and Tara’s companies are doing these things for PR and business. And, I wonder how all of you practitioners might be using these options you are suggesting to clients. So, my question is also aimed at David, Guillaume, Josh, Neville, Octavio and Dale, too. 
And forgive me. I did cross post this. Normally I remain quiet and only comment. But, I really want to hear your feedback on this one, please. Thanks.
6 comments
4/5/2005 at 11:40 am
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3/26/2005 at 9:05 pm
Lara
I don’t really follow the entirety of your article, but I did want to comment on the part about the downside of these “new” blogs. I think, like you said, that competition would almost be a benefit to the people reading these blogs. As a student I have been taught to be skeptical about what I read on the Internet so I think the comparison aspect of competition would be beneficial. Transparency, haven’t we all agreed that that is a good thing. Don’t hide something, be open, be brash, confront the situation. I know that competition does have a negative side obviously there is a threat of losing traffic, but as a reader I think it could have a little positive plus to it. Just a thought, maybe I’ll understand the post a little better after spring break. Have a good one!
3/27/2005 at 8:33 pm
Lindsay_J
We have heard so much on here about the importance of staying informed that I can’t imagine how helpful it would be if a company started up an internal aggregator blog like the one you were discussing. Employees should know what the competition is up to as well as other industry trends that an aggregator blog could report about, and the option of commenting would allow for intelligent and meaningful discussion. I think we’re on the way there. Have fun talking to the Birmingham people about blogs Robert!
4/4/2005 at 1:40 pm
TaraSmith
Companies could certainly use this sort of thing for tracking competitor news, industry trends, corporate coverage, etc. In fact, many PR agencies already offer services where they track news coverage and press releases via newsfeeds provided by folks like Factiva. Aggregator blogs seem like the next logical step.
The danger lies in the fact there is simply SO MUCH info out there. Even an aggregator blog that is limited to certain terms or writers could easily yield dozens upon dozens of posts each day. While it would be nice to think employees have enough time to read through everything and brainstorm back and forth, I don’t know that this is realistic or even desirable.
A more appealing option would be to have one or two people either in-house or at an agency (there is absolutely billable potential there) use the aggregator blog as a tool. They could comb through all of the information and provide an analysis of key points. I’ve seen a number of companies use an in-house researcher and/or PR agency this way (again, using tools like Factiva).
At Marqui, we’ve gone a little bit further in that we rely on a “conversation coordinator” that we’ve hired on a contract basis. She is something of a human “blog aggregator” in that she helps us stay on top of what everyone is saying about Marqui in the blogosphere.
4/4/2005 at 5:29 pm
BillFrench
Even an aggregator blog that is limited to certain terms or writers could easily yield
dozens upon dozens of posts each day.
Or worse yet; miss a critical item. There are many devils in the details of building such a platform. This is why it’s important to think about Robert’s exceursion as simply that; a big toe in the water. There are hundreds of dimensions that have to be considered before declaring a product is born. But the excursion is likely to be rewarding.
At our company we have products that touch upon this area and we’ve spent a fair bit of energy hardening the process and tools that bring PR professionals important data on a timely basis. This is not easy to do because the user must also be able to tweak the configuration without a coder in the room. But we’re pretty close - our blogsites provide “inteligence channels” that are secure and visible only to “insiders” and authors. We also provide aggregation of other blogs (both visible and invisible). These kinds of capabilities make it easier for a PR person to focus on what’s relevant and thus shortening the thought-to-blog cycle.
While it would be nice to think employees have enough time to read through everything and brainstorm back and forth, I don’t know that this is realistic or even desirable.
Our customers would say - “we no longer have the latitude to miss something important in the blogosphere or in our competitor’s press releases.”.
It’s certainly desireable to have a PR team that is beter informed; even over informed. And if the desire is there, it’s probably a realistic goal. But to meet that goal you have to think about things like support for filter patterns so that RSS feeds are no longer static. Instead, they’re tuned to meet exactly the needs of the users.
Examples…
Although it’s unrealistic to expect every corporate blog post to be checked for vulgar or offensive terms, it’s not unrealistic to envision a smart blog-agent that does this for you. Imagine a report that comes to the chief PR officer every night detailing any corporate blog post that *may* be offensive or mention something inappropriate. Now imagine that agent looking at every blog, website, or article referenced by every blog post made by the company; checking for comments (creating guilt-by-association) that you may not want your business referencing in the same breath. We do this now. It’s not cheap, but it’s starting to become a requirement.
These are things that make seemingly unrealistic ideas both desireable and worth the effort because they make it possible (even with resource constrained teams) to do more with less time.
4/7/2005 at 1:40 pm
TaraSmith
“We no longer have the latitude to miss something important in the blogosphere or in our competitor’s press releases.”
I think you misread my comment. I’m not questioning the value of tracking such information, I’m questionning whether it’s necessary to have 9-10 employees all spending time reading through the same info. It seems to me that it would be a more effective use of time to have 1-2 people actually analyze the information and present it to the rest for discussion. Hence my comments about in-house researchers.