Competitive Intelligence Marketplace

August Jackson Back Blogging

August Jackson, he of Competitive Intelligence Podcast fame, has finished up his MBA and it looks like he's going to be using some of his newly found free time (is any time free?) to re-start his blog.  That's good news for anyone interested in competitive intelligence as August is one of the more interesting practitioners in the biz to talk to.  Here he writes about his efforts to incorporate RSS feeds into his blog.  Welcome back August!

What Do You Do with RSS?

AlacraBlog asks an interesting question: what do you do about integrating blog content and RSS feeds in your info delivery system?

Google Alerts Explodes

For the last couple of years I've had a "competitive intelligence" alert set up on Google.  Every day I'd get an email with anywhere from one to five items, but since Google added blog tracking the number of items has exploded to around 15-20 per day.  Most interesting to me is that there are a lot of job listings in the blog section.  The only reason I can figure that the job listings are being included is that they're distributed as RSS feeds and are thus considered "blog" items.  I'll look into it and update later.

FYI, the news feed to the left is an RSS stream of the "competitive intelligence" Google alert.

CI Podcast

August Jackson of Evidenced Based Research (EBRI) has created a series of podcasts on CI which you can find at www.cipodcast.com.  Some of the podcasts include:

• Sep. 10, 2006 - A short hodgepodge episode highlighting a recent big business news story with a CI angle and lesson, a new book CI professionals should add to their fall reading list, tracking the Hoovers zeitgeist and an on-line forum for CI professionals.
• Aug. 14, 2006 - In this episode I interview Alex Graham, Executive Director of the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals. Alex discusses the results of two recent research surveys conducted by SCIP, the State of the Art: Competitive Intelligence (PDF of executive summary at http://www.scip.org/pdf/f_060608_stateofart_sum.pdf). He also discusses a survey of SCIP members on the question of certification and indications that the CI profession is on an upswing.
• Jul. 8, 2006 - In a somewhat opinionated episode, we look at some recent articles in the general media which discuss CI. Included is a look at two articles which talk about the growth of the CI practice within the legal profession.

If you are interested in all at what's going on at the Society of Competitive Intelligence Professionals you should listen to the Aug. 14 episode.  There are currently a total of 10 episodes and they're definitely worth a listen.

Rhode Island Government Experimenting with RSS

The Rhode Island state government is experimenting with RSS and other new information dissemination tools through its REX project.

This is the kind of project that promises to re-define the communication methods of government with its citizens.

You can subscribe to REX RSS feeds here.

Blogs, Wikis, RSS and Competitive Intelligence

Arik Johnson, founder of AuroraWDC (SCIP Premier Partner), has a very good article that explains what blogs, wikis and RSS mean for competitive intelligence practioners. 

The article is appearing in Competitive Intelligence Magazine.