Competitive Intelligence Marketplace

Social Network Analysis for CI

August Jackson has posted a PDF version of a presentation he did with Jim Richardson titled Social Network Analysis for CI.  If you have a few minutes it would be worth your while to check it out.  I thought these were some of the more interesting points:

• On slide 6 they compare traditional social network analysis (SNA) with SNA for CI.  They state that traditional SNA is tolerant of subjective interpersonal linkages, while for CI it is dependent on formalized relationships.
• On slide 7 they say that traditional SNA's value is derived from statistical analysis of linkages to understand the nature of interactions among groups, while in SNA for CI value is derived from determining the "so what" from linkages to drive business decisions.

Really you have to look at the presentation to truly get the full effect of their thoughts so go on and take a look.

MarketResearch.com and Spectra Intelligence Announce Deal

From the press release:

As the leading distributor of market intelligence, MarketResearch.com is pleased to announce a business partnership with Spectra Intelligence which allows for the marketing and distribution of Spectra's proprietary market analyses through the MarketResearch.com website.

The new relationship offers business professionals throughout the world easy access to complete product descriptions and tables of contents from research publications authored by market experts at Spectra Intelligence. At the same time, visitors to the MarketResearch.com website have the ability to purchase the material directly through MarketResearch.com's secure server...

Spectra Intelligence provides consistent high-quality market and management reports for the global industry and receives commissions from leading multinational pharma giants to provide competitive intelligence across product and therapy areas. Recent publications include The World Market for Gynaecology, 2007-2017, which provides unrivalled analyses of markets, products, challenges, and opportunities.

For further information about Spectra Intelligence reports, visit http://www.marketresearch.com/redirect.asp?progid=8418&vendorid=3417.

Reuters Playing Tag

Reuters' launch of their API Open Calais could have an interesting effect on secondary research.  From ReadWriteWeb's article on Open Calais which, by the way, is a nice overview:

The API does a semantic markup on unstructured HTML documents - recognizing people, places, companies, and events. This technology is the next generation of the Clear Forest offering, which Reuters acquired last year. We have profiled Clear Forest on ReadWriteWeb and in this post we will look at what Reuters opened up and why...

The idea behind Calais is simple - identify interesting bits into metadata in documents. In this implementation the focus is on People, Companies, Places, and Events, but surely the technology can be adopted to other entities. The heavy lifting is done by the combination of a natural language processing engine and a massive hard coded, learning database that Clear Forest has built.

Struggling to Identify Online Influentials

According to preliminary results of a survey by the Society for New Communications Research PR professionals are struggling with how to identify and quantify the influence of people online.  Excerpt from a Topaz Partners blog post about the findings:

Fifty-seven percent of respondents said that social media tools are becoming more valuable to their activities as more customers and influencers use them. Twenty-seven percent reported that social media is a core element of their communications strategy. Only 3 percent stated that social media has little or no value to their communications initiatives. Respondents believe that social media is most effective for the following sectors: arts, entertainment and recreation; communications; computer hardware; and education.

“Blogs, podcasts, and social networks are changing the way we think about media and influence,” said Jen McClure, executive director of the Society. “We wanted to learn what criteria communications professionals use to define new influencers; how social media is being used to communicate with these influentials; and how to measure the effects of such efforts. The ultimate goal of the study is to offer a set of recommendations to the PR profession.”

Respondents reported that the most effective tools for their social media initiatives are currently:

• Blogs
• Online video
• Social networks

The top three criteria for determining the relevance and potential influence of a blogger or podcaster are:

1. Quality of content on the blog or podcast
2. Relevance of content to the company or brand
3. Search engine rankings

Surprising to the researchers was the fact that criteria that measured online engagement for blogs and podcasts were among the least important to the respondents.

However, for online communities and social networks, the top three criteria for evaluating influence do reflect the importance of online engagement:

1. Participation level
2. Frequency of posting by the community member
3. Name recognition of the individual

Fifty-one percent of respondents are formally measuring the effects of their social media initiatives. The metrics they value most are enhancement of relationships with key audiences, enhancement of reputation, customer awareness of program and comments/posts relevant to organization/products. Close to the bottom of the list was traditional media coverage.

Need More Metadata

From AlacraBlog:

Worse than not sharing, many other sources of news (and other information) don't tag their content at all.  On Alacra Premium and the Alacra Store there's a high correlation between the quantity and quality of the metadata and the revenue we generate from a given content source.  Knowledge intensive customers subscribe to Factiva and LexisNexis for the consistent tagging as well as the overall aggregation.  At this point, tagging content is not a luxury - it's an absolute necessity.

1.8 Million Pages of Federal Case Law Available Online

Public.Resource.Org announced that 1.8 million pages of US federal case law are being made available at no cost online.  From the release:

WASHINGTON, D.C. / SEBASTOPOL, CA—November 14, 2007—Public.Resource.Org and Fastcase, Inc. announced today that they will release a large and free archive of federal case law, including all Courts of Appeals decisions from 1950 to the present and all Supreme Court decisions since 1754. The archive will be public domain and usable by anyone for any purpose.

“The U.S. judiciary has allowed their entire work product to be locked up behind a cash register,” said Carl Malamud, CEO of Public.Resource.Org. “Law is the operating system of our society and today's agreement means anybody can read the source for a substantial amount of case law that was previously unavailable.”

Fastcase, the leading developer of next-generation American legal research, has agreed to provide Public.Resource.Org with 1.8 million pages of federal case law. This is a marked departure for the online legal research industry, which traditionally has charged expensive subscription fees to access this information.

“For eight years, Fastcase has been ahead of the market curve, working to democratize access to the law,” said Ed Walters, CEO of Fastcase, Inc. “At the same time, we have been advancing the science of search, combining the precision of traditional legal research with the simplicity of Web-based searches.”

Fastcase has reversed the traditional subscription model for lawyers, contracting directly with 11 state bar associations to make the national law library free for lawyers in their states. “Through this agreement with Public.Resource.Org, we are proud to expand our efforts beyond lawyers, and to make more of the law available to the general public at no cost,” Walters said...

Public.Resource.Org intends to perform an initial transformation on the federal case law archive obtained from Fastcase using open source “star” mapping software, which will allow the insertion of markers that will approximate page breaks based on user-furnished parameters such as page size, margins, and fonts. “Wiki” technology will be used to allow the public to move around these “star” markers, as well as add summaries, classifications, keywords, alternate numbering systems for citation purposes, and ratings or “diggs” on opinions.

Carpe: How the Social internet simplifies source identification

David Carpe webifies his article from Competitive Intelligence Magazine:

SITES WITH INFORMATION ABOUT PEOPLE

Rather than walk you through a dizzying array of sites, I’ll cluster these assorted tools into a few large groups and grade several as if they were students in the class of Web 2.0 (where there are no straight A students). From here, you can easily identify those sites worthy of your honest time and consideration. As you may imagine, this list is by no means exhaustive.

WorldCat

From Cool Tools comes this item on WorldCat:

WorldCat is a publicly accessible online interface to the holdings of all types of libraries throughout the world: currently 57,000 libraries in 112 countries. Tell it what book you're looking for and your zip code or city, and it will pinpoint the nearest library that has the book. Same goes for magazines and journals, video and audio formats. The ability to locate an obscure book is invaluable; but it's also tremendously useful for anyone living in a region with more than one nearby library. California's Bay Area is blessed with an abundance of excellent public and academic library systems and a majority of them are represented in WorldCat, so in my case, it's a real time saver (I do a lot of sleuthing). The database was originally accessible only by taking a trip to the library, but in 2004, the nonprofit Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) built this interface. Beyond the core location service, WorldCat provides many other helpful services and resources, like citation exporting, list making, and text samples. I haven't explored these options much, but you can use it to build your own private or public indexes of titles and to search public lists created by other users. You can even read and write reviews of materials - yes, you can actually write in the library catalog! And if you decide you'd actually prefer to purchase the item, there are Amazon and WorldCat purchase links (a portion of every WorldCat sale goes toward supporting a local library of your choosing or to the OCLC). You'll need to create a WorldCat account to take advantage of these features, but account creation goes really quickly and it's free.

Alacra Launches ResearchRecap.com

Alacra launched a new website called ResearchRecap.com.  Here's what they said about it on their blog:

At Alacra, we get to see a lot of research - we are partners with dozens of research publishers (Moody's, Fitch, S&P, Forrester, Freedonia, etc,) and also redistribute a number of aggregated sets of investment and market research (Investext, Reuters Research and marketresearch.com).  Plus, we have publishers of all sizes asking us to load their content on Alacra and the Alacra Store for resale.  So we thought there would be interest in a website that highlighted some of the best research published in the business arena and we began to develop Research Recap.  We built some tools that automate how new research gets to us to help with the discovery process and we have a handful of editors select and comment upon the best pieces.  These comments are posted with links at www.researchrecap.com. There are two goals:  First, to help consumers of research find interesting, relevant and current content.  Second, to provide a forum for smaller research publishers to expose their content on a site other than their own. 

There's no firm business model right now (costs are low), but some of the research we highlight will be available for sale in the Alacra Store.  To ensure we have a terrific, objective site we've brought on fellow Knight-Ridder alum Angus Robertson to be editor-in-chief.  If you have any comments or suggestion please let me know. 

Wink - New People Search Tool

From the Confidential Resource: "Wink searches the major social networks and the Web to find people. The site also provides search filters such as location, age, and interests to help narrow down your search for common names. This search engine allows you to enter a location and other keywords to help narrow the search."