msurveys:blog

Conference/Second Life round-up

2008-07-01T12:13:00.020+01:00

Over the last 2-3 weeks, I've been speaking together with Diana from Derval Research at a couple of research conferences (IIR in Chicago and Esomar Innovate in Copenhagen). It occurred to me that these papers and presentations give a nice overview of our activities in Second Life so far, so decided to post the Chicago paper, presentation and video here.

The paper can be downloaded from here

Here's the presentation:

| View | Upload your own

.. and here's the "Live from Second Life" lip-sync video, showing the SLIC survey sofas and an automated interviewer bot:
(Best viewed in full screen)

[If your browser doesn't load the embedded video, try accessing the video directly]

Oh, and last but not least - the eLab City project by the University of California Riverside (see my previous blog post) has now opened for the public, here is Tom's post announcing the soft launch. I feel there will be a lot of exciting things happening in that space.

MRS conference, and a few other updates

2008-03-25T11:51:00.006Z

It's been a while since I posted here, due to some busy times at work... and at least partly due to having a paper accepted for the MRS Research 2008 conference. The paper, co-written with Diana Derval of Derval Research, was part of a fun session on Web 2.0 and communities, which was generally well received (as far as I'm aware at least..).

If you're looking for a write-up of the event, the most thorough I've found so far is Simon K's 4-part oeuvre - well worth a read, and don't be put off by its length.

In other news, Ray Poynter of Virtual Surveys has created a social network for market researchers, called Market Research Space. There's a number of interesting discussions happening already, so if you're into that sort of thing, do sign up - you'll find me there too, so feel free to connect!

GMI's NetPanel in Bebo

2008-01-19T17:26:00.000Z

Bebo have gone live with their apps developer program. It's essentially a clone of the Facebook API, so porting existing facebook applications is very easy. Below a screenshot from a prototype app integrating GMI's NetPanel2 panel management software into Bebo - a clone of the NetPanel facebook prototype I first described last year in this post.

I imagine this could be of particular interest to brands or agencies wanting to connect with teenagers in the UK, given Bebo's dominant position in the UK teen/youth market (and I even speak from personal experience here - it's the de-facto standard way of sharing photos, blog posts etc. for my daughter and most of her friends).

Working with UC Riverside's eLab City

2008-01-08T10:21:00.000Z

I'm very pleased to be working with the University of California Riverside's Sloan Center on their eLab City project in Second Life, see UCR's full press release.

GMI's involvement is along two lines:

- Direct integration of GMI's NetPanel2 panel management software with Second Life, enabling UCR to recruit and manage their academic panelists both in-world in Second Life, and through a conventional web-based interface. Objects inside Second Life are programmed using LSL to communicate with the panel management software through NetPanel2's XML-RPC web services.

- Creating and running survey avatar "bots" (automated Second Life users programmed and controlled by software) that are able to approach and engage respondents inside Second Life. These bots work along the same lines as the ones previously described here (for a video see the bottom of this previous post), so are able to conduct a survey using GMI's online survey software in-world, as well as being able approach potential respondents in a variety of different ways. This means the bot can also measure "meta-data" - e.g. reaction to the way it behaves or approaches people - in addition to the survey data itself.

For additional info, http://www.elabcity.com is updated regulary with updates of the development.

TechCrunch on "the new focus group"

2007-11-17T23:36:00.000Z

TechCrunch has a post called "The New Focus Group", mentioning two companies offering "white-label social networks to consumer research": Mzinga and Networked Insights. These offerings let "companies create a place on their sites where customers can hang out and talk about their products".

While this sounds interesting in some ways, I do wonder how many brands out there would have a chance in hell of carrying this off. Perhaps I'm the only one feeling a certain social networking ennui - but I certainly would much rather engage with brands in my existing social networking context (if I felt like engaging with brands at all), rather than joining yet another site somewhere.

Now that pretty much all the social networking sites are starting to open up to outside content (see Facebook apps and OpenSocial), I do wonder why not more people are looking at taking advantage of existing social networks, rather than providing the tools for creating custom ones. While this is technically not too difficult, I think it's not easy to create a "community" top-down, so I do have my reservations about these kinds of corporate-driven "let's create a social network around our brand" efforts. I just can't see average people flocking to these places just for the benefit of "talking about a brand's product". Embedding this kind of community inside my existing social network surely has a much better chance of succeeding?

GMI's NetPanel2 inside OpenSocial

2007-11-16T18:47:00.000Z

Following on from my post about Google's OpenSocial announcement I've finally sat down to play with it, and implemented a bare-bones panel management app in the same vein as my Facebook prototype.

Again, this panel management and recruitment functionality could (and typically probably would) be part of some more specific, interest- or community-based application, which can then be embedded into pretty much any social networking site, including MySpace and Bebo once they fully start supporting it (full list of OpenSocial partners here).

For now, Ning and Orkut have implemented sandbox areas for OpenSocial, so I've taken some screenshots of both - remember this is the same OpenSocial/NetPanel2 application, just embedded in different social networking sites. The actual functionality is the same as the Facebook prototype, i.e. when a user adds the application to their profile, they get automatically added to the panel in GMI's NetPanel2, and as panel owner you can then communicate with your users through the embedded app, including sending survey invites, handling and redeeming incentives, etc. etc.

Here's two screenshots showing the application on Ning, the initial screen telling the user that there's a new survey, and the survey screen with the list of surveys and the link to take part.

... and here's the exact same two screens, but this time embedded in Orkut rather than Ning:

So... the combination of GMI's NetPanel2 and Google's OpenSocial allows for market research panel recruitment and management functionality to be embedded inside specific applications targetted at pretty much all the major social networking sites. Am I the only one that thinks this could be powerful stuff?

Google announces OpenSocial

2007-11-02T09:53:00.000Z

Google announced their OpenSocial API yesterday - making it a competitor to Facebook in the API/apps stakes. This API makes it possible to build applications for most of the major social networking sites (see here for a full list of launch partners, including MySpace) without having to re-write things for each site.

In turn, this means we should be able to integrate GMI panel management and recruitment features into all these sites, using just one application (with some CSS and UI tweaks for each of the sites) in the same way my facebook prototype works.

So if you're after finding business people, deploy your panel app to LinkedIn, if you're after youth panels go for Bebo, etc. etc.. all with that one set of technology (the yet-to-be-built-but-watch-this-space GMI NetPanel2 -> OpenSocial integration).

Of course, you'll need context, common interest etc. to be able to build these kinds of communities, but surely it makes much more sense to integrate into existing networking sites (after all, that's where the people are already), rather than develop and build up your own brand- or research-specific social networking clone? And that integration has just become a whole lot easier.

Below is the video from Google Campfire One, introducing OpenSocial. It's long, but contains tons of demos, so well worth a look.

Presentation at NEON Plenum

2007-10-30T14:17:00.000Z

I had the pleasure of talking about GMI and Second Life survey technology at the NEON (Network Online Research) Plenum in Hamburg yesterday.

For all German speakers amongst my readers, my presentation (in German) is available for download here. Note that it's very large (24MB), as it contains a couple of Flash videos filmed in Second Life (if you do download the presentation, right-click and select "Play" to play the embedded Flash videos).

Generally it was a very interesting get-together, with discussions centered around Second Life/virtual worlds, web 2.0, and the ever-green "quality of online access panels".

If you want to quickly view the presentation and videos separately, they are embedded here:

| View | Upload your own

Individual videos:

SLIC Interview Sofa:

GMI Interview Bot:

Should there be a BarCamp for MR? MRCamp anyone?

2007-10-10T15:39:00.000+01:00

Having spent a little time looking through the conversations in some of the MR-related facebook groups (as an aside, I wish there was a more proactive way that groups would update you with what's being posted on their walls and discussions), I came across one that talked about a wish for some BarCamp-like meetups to share information on web 2.0 and social media for research and insight (as an alternative to the big, expensive, and generally top-down MR conferences).

I think that's a brilliant idea - for BarCamp read MRCamp!

It's vaguely in the same area as the Research Liberation Front, who ran a fringe meeting at the last MRS conference in Brighton, but would ideally be closer to the "everyone presents something" BarCamp ethos.

Is anyone up for this? If so, please contribute to the community wiki at mrcamp.org. If not, we'll consign it to the dustbin of history..

Integrating GMI's panel management software into Facebook

2007-09-11T23:50:00.000+01:00

I recently had a thought about using Facebook for panel recruitment and engagement - a lot of what GMI's panel management software offers could actually be embedded into Facebook through using the GMI NetPanel2 web services in conjunction with the Facebook platform API. A couple of evenings later, and I have this:

Rather basic at the moment, but the beginnings of GMI NetPanel2/Facebook application integration...

*Update*: I improved on the layout a bit, so now different panel functions appear in the original Facebook style tabs. The more I play with this, the clearer it becomes that survey panel management can really be embedded deeply inside Facebook, both in terms of look and feel, and functionality.

What this means is that instead of creating panelist portal websites or similar recruitment efforts, we can develop a Facebook application for a given panel/community you want to build. When a facebook users adds the application to their profile, they're automatically being added to the panel through the NetPanel2 software, and from there you can allocate surveys to all or a subset of your Facebook users - and the links to complete these surveys will appear on the application canvas and optionally on their profile pages.

In short, I think this could be a useful way for a market research company or consumer brand to recruit and interact with Facebook users. Agree?

SLIC - Second Life Interview Corner

2007-09-07T12:39:00.000+01:00

GMI has just announced a project I'm involved in, together with Diana Derval from Derval Research:

SLIC, the Second Life Interview Corner, featuring probably the world's first interviewing sofas! :-)

It's already been picked up by both Research magazine and MrWeb.

Multi-user Google Earth, including bots

2007-08-31T14:44:00.000+01:00

The "Business and Games blog" has some interesting info on avatars and bots in Google Earth, using Unype.

Unype has also developed chat bots that can live inside Google Earth: "You can park your bot and leave your salespost ( hotel, house for sale, car dealership, resort, or simply a store ) and go away. The Unype bot will talk to your visitors for you and keep a log of what happened. The brain is completely programmable by a simple text editor and a little knowledge of AIML so you can customize it to say exactly what you would like it to say."

While these current bots appear to be using AIML (the Alice brain), I would imagine it should be possible to integrate some other back-end with it, like the online survey communications channel I set up for my Second Life survey bots. So who knows - survey/interviewing bots in Google Earth soon?

Quirks article on market research technology and Second Life

2007-07-26T23:27:00.000+01:00

The latest issue of Quirks Marketing Research Review carries an article of mine on Second Life and market research technology in virtual/ 3D worlds. Courtesy of Quirks and GMI, you can see a PDF version of the piece here: http://www.gmi-mr.com/documents/newsletters/2007-07-Quirks.pdf

Joel Greenberg on the "value of measuring engagement"

2007-06-12T11:46:00.000+01:00

Joel Greenberg over at the Electric Sheep Company blog has a great post on the value of measuring engagement, and how virtual worlds are uniquely placed in this respect. Follow the title link to read the entire piece - it's worth it -, but here's a few quick highlights:

"Does any competitor have a realistic shot at competing against Nielsen? They might if they measure engagement; and virtual worlds potentially have something over the real world: more data. Potentially, marketing in virtual worlds could lead the way in measuring engagement that could leak out into the larger marketing world.

There’s emotional engagement, like marketing that elicits strong feelings. There’s social engagement, like spreading word of mouth, participating in a group like Harley HOGs, etc. There’s physical engagement, like playing with or using a product.

[...] Usage. Word of mouth. Virtual Worlds can track both. In other words, measuring engagement is possible.

[...] Here some ideas for what engagement metrics we could measure:

- how may times the item has been given to others, a form of “word of mouth”. This kind of tracking makes even more sense for collectibles/tradeables.
- how long it’s been used, or when it was stopped being used.
- how many times it was used.
- what functions are being used and how often.
- the number of other avatars that have seen the object (impressions).

[...] It’s this idea of collecting data on engagement that’s so exciting; it could potentially be the catalyst to change RL marketing."

Second Life survey bot with IronPython and libsecondlife

2007-06-05T17:46:00.000+01:00

I recently experimented a little with libsecondlife (the open-source, reverse-engineered Second Life library) together with IronPython, a .NET Python implementation. It worked almost straight out of the box, even on Mac OSX on my MacBook Pro (via Mono).

Using the same survey backend code I used for my experiments with inanimate survey objects inside Second Life and the semi-human modified Second Life viewer, this let me quickly write a Python-powered bot that logs into Second Life, and then responds to avatars chatting to it. Unlike the Second Life client modification I created earlier, this is purely a bot, so there is no human intervention at all.

If you watch the video below, you'll see me come up to the bot girl, and say hello. She responds to me, and tells me she'd just love it if she could ask me some survey questions. As instructed, I reply with the word "survey", and she starts asking the survey questions (after doing a backflip out of sheer happiness that I will take part in her survey!). The survey technology here is identical to the previous examples, linking to GMI's Net-MR survey back-end. At the end of survey she blows me a kiss and pays me a Linden dollar (a bit stingy, I agree, but the kiss makes up for it).

Nothing too earth-shattering here, reusing much of my previous prototypes, but I think quite a nice example of the kind of thing we can do in Second Life to provide engaging and fun survey experiences. Also note some of the typing animation that makes the bot seem that little more real. I came away thinking I've made someone happy (even though I could see Belle's debug stream on my other screen) :-)

Latest GMI Poll Reveals Second Life’s Potential for Virtual Consumer Marketing and Branding

2007-04-26T09:23:00.000+01:00

GMI (disclosure: my employer) has started releasing some summary results of a GMIPoll on Second Life. The only one I have right now is the U.S. release, but the rest are due to be published in due course.

A few snippets, based on the U.S. data (GMI interviewed 9,529 consumers, representing a broad sample of the U.S. population aged 18 and above. The interviews were conducted online among GMI’s permission-based consumer panel using GMI’s data collection software):

"The latest GMI Poll, powered by global market intelligence solutions provider GMI (Global Market Insite, Inc.), found the virtual world of Second Life is a burgeoning market for real-life brands and product promotion. Fifty-six percent of users believe Second Life is a good promotional vehicle. Only 16 percent say they would not be more likely to buy or use a brand that is represented in the Internet-based virtual world.

“Second Life is still in its infancy, and nobody knows if this virtual world has true staying power or is just a fad,” explained Michael Cai, director, broadband and gaming at Park Associates, a Dallas-based market research and consulting firm specializing in digital and connectivity products and services for the home. “What is clear from the GMI poll is that Second Life is a potential, untapped source for marketing and branding. The people at Linden Lab have the opportunity to build out a new platform for promotion, much like Yahoo and Google did for the internet.”

The poll also revealed that many Second Life users go to the virtual world to avoid reality. Twenty-four percent of respondents claim they go to Second Life to escape real life, which they are not satisfied with, while 64 percent present themselves differently. Additional findings include:

* 45 percent give themselves a more attractive body
* 37 percent make themselves younger
* 23 percent give themselves a different nationality
* 55 percent watch less television since becoming active in Second Life
* 22 percent have more Second Life friends than real-life friends
* 29 percent feel Second Life interferes with their real-world social life

The Second Life GMIPoll surveyed a total of 9,529 U.S. consumers between March 27th and April 9th, 2007 on the GMI platform. Additional Second Life polls were conducted in Australia, China, Denmark, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and the UK. For more information about GMIPoll, please contact GMI (Global Market Insite, Inc.) at info@gmi-mr.com."

Gartner Says 80 Percent of Active Internet Users Will Have A ``Second Life'' in the Virtual World by the End of 2011

2007-04-25T12:41:00.000+01:00

This via Forbes.com (brought to my attention through this tweet by twitter contact Gerrit Visser):

"By the end of 2011, 80 percent of active Internet users (and Fortune 500 enterprises) will have a "second life," but not necessarily in Second Life, according to Gartner, Inc.

Gartner analysts are examining the hype and reality around virtual worlds during Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2007: Emerging Trends, being held here through April 26. Gartner's advice to enterprise clients is that this is a trend that they should investigate and experiment with, but limit substantial financial investments until the environments stabilize and mature."

Gartner has apparently identified five laws for companies participating in the virtual world. Bullet points (abbreviated) are:

First Law: Virtual worlds are not games, but neither are they a parallel universe (yet). The initial reaction of many business leaders when faced with virtual worlds is to dismiss them as a mere "game" of no benefit to the enterprise and something to be banned for wasting compute resources and time. Many of those that see beyond the gaming elements immediately veer toward questions such as "How do we exploit this as a sales channel?" This reaction is equally incorrect and potentially even more damaging to the enterprise.

Second Law: Behind every avatar is a real person. Gartner said people can't be fooled by the fantasy elements in the virtual world.

Third Law: Be relevant and add value. Many commercial companies have established a virtual world presence, but none have converted it into an effective, profitable sales channel.

Fourth Law: Understand and contain the downside. Enterprises face serious questions, such as "Could activities in the virtual world undermine or influence my organization/brand in the real world?"

Fifth Law: This is a long haul. Today's multiplicity of virtual environments has developed through the convergence of social networking, simulation and online gaming. There are many new entrants, whose stability and scalability are not yet established. There is significant probability that, over time, market pressures will lead to a merging of current virtual worlds into a smaller number of open-sourced environments that support the free transfer of assets and avatars from one to another with the use of a single, universal client."

The article closes with ...

Gartner recommends that enterprises should experiment with virtual worlds, but not plan massive projects, and look for community benefits rather than commerce. "Find enthusiasts within your enterprise and support them. Understand the implications for access to open virtual platforms from within the enterprise and the risks involved," Mr. Prentice said. "Despite the concerns within companies, don't ignore this trend. They will have a significant impact on your enterprise during the next five years."

Contextual ad billboards in Second Life

2007-04-19T09:34:00.000+01:00

Via New World Notes: advertising billboards that listen to the chat around them, and display targeted adverts based on keywords they hear, sort of Ad-sense like (and just as hit and miss).

Video demo:

Interesting, although as one comment points out, you may need to make it clearer that chat is being monitored for these purposes.

WARC online research conference: summary

2007-03-16T17:29:00.000Z

I had the pleasure of attending and speaking at WARC's "What next for online research" conference yesterday. I enjoyed hearing from a number of interesting people, and it was nice to meet some folks in person that I've previously only known by name, as well as catching up with some older existing acquaintances..

WARC have written up a summary of the conference and papers. Worth a read if you couldn't attend in person. I don't know where that reference to a "44D avatar interviewer" came from though... some glimpse into the private fantasies of the writer perhaps?

The Research Liberation Front

2007-03-16T16:27:00.000Z

Hey man, check out the RLF... cool yeah?

"The RLF is not associated in any manner with the following groups: ELF, ALF , CIA , FBI, KGB, the Peoples Research Liberation Front, The Front of Liberated Researchers, MRS , END, THE, YAZ, ABC, CAD, PVC, HSA, ICE, INS , WAY, AND , NOW , NRA, IRS , COD , GIN, GAS , SUX, SAX, SEX, BBC , PIX , PIC , PLC , TLC, TOP, TIP, TIF , GIF, JPG, BNP , BUS, ZIP, WEB , LAW, TAX, DOC , APG, IPA, ESOMAR or RAD."

This has to be one of the funnier MR related sites I've seen in recent months - although with a more serious message somewhere in there, as the story tells. They are also running a fringe meeting during the MRS conference in Brighton next week.

Way to go, comrades!

PS3 virtual world - metaverse going mainstream?

2007-03-07T21:23:00.000Z

This just in via 3pointD:

"Before you do anything else, watch the trailer above, which just went up on GameTrailers.com after being shown at GDC. It shows a PS3 service from Sony called “home,” which is, yes, a free 3D online space where you’ll be able to customize your avatar and your own private home, hang out with other users there and in various common spaces, stream your media into your virtual pad (as in Kaneva), and chat via voice, emotes, short pre-loaded phrases or with a USB keyboard, as well as hook up with other people and follow them into PS3 games. In terms of pushing the metaverse out to the mainstream, this is pretty huge news."

It certainly seems like a big step towards the mainstream, as well as potentially making the PS3 appeal to whole new demographic. I wonder how extensible this service/platform will be. I feel the in-game survey concept, or at the very least the in-game-console survey concept, is about to take a big step forward..

Update: Alice over at Wonderland has notes on Phil Harrison's keynote speech on "Game 3.0", part of which was about the "Home" service. From the sounds of it, they will be providing extensibility - the service is built using Maya, and Sony will provide SDKs to developers.

Full 20-minute video of the speech/demo, worth having a look:

polls and surveys via twitter?

2007-03-05T23:05:00.000Z

James Governor is thinking about using twitter as a light-weight polling tool:

"So I am looking for 1000 followers to the RedMonkRSVP twitter id. The idea is that we will be able to run instant polls according to our, and your, research ideas. Sort of a lightweight yougov poll. Twitter was never intended for this but I would like to try it and I need your help. Please get people to sign up and lets start twittering the wisdom of the crowds. I don’t have an infrastructure in place to aggregate and query results, but when did that ever stop anyone from achieving cool things?"

[If twitter means nothing to you, this post from BBC backstage has some useful introductory info.]

I've been thinking about this too, given the popularity of twitter (my BBC twitter bots currently have more than 3000 followers), and the way twitter can be used as a simple platform for delivering content via web, IM and SMS messaging.

While I can't quite see James' idea working as it is, given my previous experience with IM bots and survey technology (see also my IM survey bots), I think something along these lines may work:

survey invites are easy - you can easily get a list of your followers in XML and JSON formats
rather than using the public timeline, everything should run via direct messaging
an IM bot can send a direct message to each follower, using the twitter bot and IM lingo
as long as respondents reply with a direct message back, and I configure my twitter account to deliver direct messages to IM, the same IM bot can catch responses and aggregate them in the survey backend, as well as sending out the next question to be asked

This process would be confidential (no-one else can see questions and responses), while still making use of the twitter infrastructure both for survey notification and multi-channel survey delivery via IM, SMS or web.

In addition, this would mean that entire surveys, not just simple one-question polls are possible, given that the IM bot is communicating with a fully fledged survey backend.

Much of this functionality is already implemented in the existing survey bots I worked on previously, so I'm just waiting for the twitter IM functionality to become more functional again before setting something up (at the moment, there seem to be some problems around twitter, e.g. I can't even see the twitter@twitter.com bot online).

I'll post here again once the twitter IM functionality is back up and in a reasonably reliable state, and I've had the time to put together a simple prototype.

Softening borders between qual and quant

2007-02-28T19:05:00.000Z

mrweb.com have a news item on TNSInsightTvLive (doesn't exactly roll off the tongue), described as "an interactive online platform which allows respondents to see a survey moderator via a real-time video link".

They then go on to say they've seen a number of similar "combinations of online surveys with qualitative input, the option for moderators to interject with on-the-hoof questions and simultaneous multimedia links" (links in the original mrweb.com post). At a pre-conference speakers meeting for the What Next For Online Research 2007 conference there were at least two papers that went into similar territory - a much closer co-operation between quant and qual researchers and techniques.

As it happens, Linden Lab, the owners of Second Life, have just announced upcoming support for in-world voice (for a summary see this comprehensive post on TechCrunch). This would make a virtual world, avatar-driven equivalent of the above research techniques a lot more realistic - I could see using quantitative data collection in the vein of one of my prototypes, together with more qual-type interaction through a human-driven, voice-enabled avatar offering a real but more affordable alternative.
In addition, especially for new product concepts, the 3D immersive qualities of a virtual world like Second Life will be able to offer not just visuals, but 3D representations that can be handled, worn (where appropriate), and with the required knowledge, even modified by survey (or focus group, or whatever we want to call this now) participants - thus potentially moving into co-creation.

Vizu gets funding

2007-02-01T00:43:00.000Z

via StartupSquad:

"Vizu, provider of market research through web polls network, has raised $2.9 million in the Series B round of funding. The funding round was led by Draper Fisher Jurvetson who contributed $1.5 million. Vizu has been aggressively building up its premier service Vizu Answers which enables market research through web polls distributed around the Vizu site network. As a publisher or blogger you can sign up for the service, run a site characterization poll, and then Vizu will start running contextual polls on your site."

It's quite an interesting idea - they're using web sites and blogs, each with their unique target audience, as a way to distribute polls. So instead of profiling respondents, they profile the sites and blogs where polls are placed.
Obviously this is more efficient, but it will be interesting to see how this works out in reality - is it really any different from how the majority of web surveys were deployed back in the nineties - basically identifying some popular web sites whose audience match the respondents you're looking for, and then paying them for hosting popup windows to your survey? Are embedded widgets just the popups of the 21st century?

Ogilvy teams up with Technorati to tap into blogs

2007-02-01T00:27:00.000Z

research-live.com reports that "Technorati is partnering with Ogilvy to help the marketing services agency monitor online word-of-mouth".

This area is slowly getting more crowded, with the recent launch of BuzzLogic competing with existing services such as Nielsen BuzzMetrics.

Thinking about it, it seems obvious to try and partner with one of the major blog tracking services, so I wonder if this will give Ogilvy an edge over the existing services? What can a partnership with Technorati deliver that Nielsen or BuzzLogic can't?