First of all, on the always excellent App Gap blog, Bill Ives covers BlogBridge Feed Libraries, from the perspective of Enterprise 2.0. He says:

“The BlogBridge Feed Libraries can be the ’web content directories’ where users can browse and search for recommendations of content to read with their RSS Aggregators. The experts within your firm can place in the Feed Library the blogs and other sites that they feel will best address the issues that employees face as they deal with the topic cover by the Feed Library.

For example, one firm might have Feed Libraries on Marketing, Engineering, Human Resources and Manufacturing. Another might cover Biology, Medicine, Technology, Management, and Research. A bioresearch firm might have different libraries for subsets of Biology. It puts your experts in control of the recommendations for web reading. At the same time individuals can customize it with their own additions for their individual RSS feed lists.” (from BlogBridge Feed Libraries for Enterprise 2.0)

You should read the whole article, as it covers the product very nicely and from a broad perspective.

In a related post, Robert Brekman follows Bill’s post up, saying that he likes the concept:

“I recently came across a post that caught my eye that presents an interesting solution for serious researchers and for enterprise use of feeds that can help with this.” (from Intelligent Agent)

We call it “Discover other blogs”. Here’s how it works: At any time when reading a blog, if it looks like there’s some interesting topics being referenced, just click the Discover Other Blogs command (on the Feeds menu, or the right-click menu.) That’s all there is to it.

Magically you will see links in the articles get highlighted, some red and some green.

A green highlight means this is a link to some blog that you are already subscribed  to. Not too exciting, just move along.

But, a red highlight means that the author is referencing another blog that you don’t currently know. If you mouse hover over the link you see a cool infobox telling you what we know about this blog: particularly what the title of the blog is and also how many other blogs link to it (a good indicator of how good it is.) 

A simple right click on the link lets you subscribe to the feed so you can start watching it and decide whether it’s a keeper or not. 

This is delivers an end-to-end answer: read a blog, see a referenced blog and it’s readership, and if it looks good, subscribe to it. All in just a couple of clicks. The circle of life.

(Those of us worried about information overload might then follow with a “delete” of the previous blog that actually wasn’t all that good after all!)

Now in my title I put the word Analysis in “quotes” because true analysis requires a level of language dependent natural language processing which so far is beyond our grasp. But we think what we have is a good, powerful, practical and understandable capability.

The point is simple: we classify all articles as having either positive or negative sentiment. In other words are they saying nice positive encouraging happy things, or evil sucky, mean spirited and depressing things? 

[To have a sense of why this is not something you can do with perfection, even if you are an intelligent human, tell me whether this sentence is positive or negative: “The King is dead! Long live the king!” See, it’s not obvious ]

Articles are marked with a pretty little colored red dot if they are deemed negative and an pretty little green dot if they are positive.

Also there is a filter for showing only positive or only negative articles.

And finally, and most useful, you can write SmartFeeds to pick out positive and negative articles, meaning there’s a new condition that you can include, combining with other conditions, to select for positive or negative sentiment.

So how does all this work? Well you just turn it on, of course, and you are in business. The command can be found on the Tools menu, Settings submenu, Sentiment Analysis. Just click the checkbox and press OK.

If you are not reading English language blogs then you most certainly will have to tune it, and you might want to anyway, by choosing Advanced… from the Sentiments dialog box.

You will see a list of words that we have chosen to correspond to positivity and a set of words that we have chosen to mean negativity. You are welcome of course to change those around to include your own sense of what words are most useful there.

So there you have it. BlogBridge Sentiment Analysis. We hope you like it. Please let us know what you think. We are very proud of it!

As mentioned above, it is one of the various power features that are offered to our Publisher level subscribers. I know everyone would rather have it as part of the basic product, but please understand that we also need to make some money on this project and the best way we know how to do that is to keep on adding value so our users are glad to support our work.

Second, sign up for a trial account. All subscriptions have an automatic 30 day trial period during which you can get your subscription cost refunded. To see this new feature in action, you need ‘publisher’ level which costs $25/3 months.

If you are new to BlogBridge, you should know that the majority of our functionality is in fact free of charge. You can sign up for a free account. For $5/3 months you get major increases in capacity - we call this the ‘basic’ edition, and for $25/3 months you can get a ‘publisher’ edition.

Let me explain.

The Post to Blog feature closes the loop for prolific micro publishers, making it super easy to use material that you find while reading with BlogBridge, as the basis for your own blog posts. It is a rich and powerful feature.

You tell BlogBridge about the blog to which you want to post. When you read something that inspires you to want to write to your blog, just type “b” (or click the Post to Blog command) and up comes a little blog post editor, pre-populated with whatever you were reading, which you can then edit further and post to the blog.

This feature exists in a simple form for all “basic” edition users, and in a much more advanced form for “publishing” edition users. 

New with 6.3 is that you can create a template for the blog posts that are created. You can have many of them, for example: “News item”, “Tech note”, “Remaindered Links” and so on, each with custom html. 

The screen displayed shows how you create and edit your new templates. Note the use of a series of special variables, where BlogBridge fills in key information from the article that you are quoting.

Check it out, and let us know what you think! 

Second, sign up for a trial account. All subscriptions have an automatic 30 day trial period during which you can get your subscription cost refunded. To see this new feature in action, you need ‘publisher’ level which costs $25/3 months.

If you are new to BlogBridge, you should know that the majority of our functionality is in fact free of charge. You can sign up for a free account. For $5/3 months you get major increases in capacity - we call this the ‘basic’ edition, and for $25/3 months you can get a ‘publisher’ edition.

And secondly, our Enterprise 2.0 guide by Bill Ives has also been thoroughly updated with new sources and information from the best people writing about how web 2.0 tools and models are being deployed inside the enterprise. It includes writers such as AndrewMcAfee, Stowe Boyd, John Hagel, and Dion Hinchcliffe.

We are always working with our Experts to keep their lists up to date and relevant, as we are looking for new Experts to expand our coverage. If you have ideas for new topics that we should offer - particularly if you can recommend a recognized expert in the field, please, let us know!

Better Smart Feeds

As you can see below we’ve refined the display of Smart Feeds in several ways. As you can see in the screen shot below, the article ‘9 People and Their Laws’ is picked up in this Smart Feed from the Feed “A List of Lists”.

The source of the original feed is displayed right under the title, in the form of a citation, “from: A List of Lists”. That citation is clickable (to navigate to the source feed, and it also has a context (right click) menu, so you can directly tag the original article, post it to your blog and do the other things.

Flexible Articles

Article display itself is now more flexible. Take a look at the settings that we have to allow you to customize the way articles are displayed.

There are 3 article display styles: Minimal, Brief and Full.

For each style you can pick and choose what elements of the article are displayed.

Now you can also ask that the clickable URL for the article is displayed right in the header.

You can control how much of the article text is displayed in Brief mode, and how many articles there are per page.

And of course like all preferences, these are part of the sync service so you’ll have the same configuration no matter where you are.

To try these new features you need to be running BlogBridge Weekly Development releases.

For new users, let me explain that all new functionality is first previewed in our Weekly Devlopment Release. Once feature development, testing and beta testing is complete, approximately every 3-6 months, we issue an official “Stable” release.

The current stable release is 6.0.2, and the current Weekly Development Release is 6.1. Read this page for assistance in installing BlogBridge Weekly Development Release.

Finally, here is the complete revision history for BlogBridge.

A free trial is available and can be set up with a minimum of effort and time. So please send in an email requesting a trial and we’ll take care of you.

One way to learn more is to take a look at the Feed Library Trial - Getting Started Screen Cast. 

[By the way, did you know that we have a large collection of BlogBridge Screen Casts about all of our products and services? Check them out, they are pretty popular!]

It’s been quite interesting to hear how the ‘blogosphere’ is posing new challenges to Public Relations and Corporate Communications executives. Many of the tried and true ways of delivering a valuable service to clients don’t seem to be working anymore. In fact there are those out there that say that ‘traditional PR is dying”.

I thought it would be interesting to share some of the preliminary learnings.

Big questions that PR people are losing sleep over

From my interviews, here are some of the big questions that PR people are losing sleep over:

1. What are the top blogs that are most relevant for client X? Unlike mainstream media, there are no good databases to assemble a ‘press list’ of bloggers for a particular client. And yet, what is said about the client by an influential blogger might actually be seen by more relevant people than if it was published for example in the Boston Globe. Assembling a good list is time consuming and very uncertain work.
2. Finding the coverage that matters and ignoring the noise. There is positive, negative and neutral coverage in blogs just like in any media — the big customer crisis versus the individual crank blogger. When something either positive, but especially negative is said, it needs to be spotted quickly and a decision needs to be made what to do about it. While one can’t afford to overwhelm clients with noise, the biggest nightmare is that call from the boss because she was the first to see the article in the Wall Street Journal.
3. What about metrics? What is the influence of this blogger, or the circulation of that one? What will the impact be of this bit of coverage on the client? Again, traditional ways of looking at metrics totally fall apart in the world of new media, and yet there is a requirement to quantify the results and impact.

Do these challenges ring true to you?

Technorati Tags: PR Blogosphere