Tracking and Measuring Buzz on Social Media:. Part Four: Tools for Blogs, Forum and User Groups.

Social media aren’t just places like Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, LinkedIn and so on. Long before that kind of sites started exisitng, there already were other, smaller, less impressive social media. It was from blogs, forums and user groups that the whole idea of Web 2.0 had its beginnings.

To understand what blogs are, and how they are used, I suggest you read that brief presntation by Rohit Bhargava, and then check the tools.

Here you’ll find Blog Specific Tools.

Bloglines: Bloglinesis a FREE online service that helps you subscribe to and manage lots of web information, such as news feeds, weblogs and audio.
Bloglines tracks the information you’re interested in, retrieves new stuff as it happens, and organizes everything for you on your own personal web news page. Bloglines is a “news aggregator“.
Many online information sources, including Web sites, Weblogs and news services, now broadcast their content to the web in so-called “syndicated feeds” or “news feeds” with new technologies like Really Simple Syndication (RSS) and ATOM. News aggregator software and services collect those syndicated feeds and present them to end users in a variety of ways. additions and direct new information onto your Bloglines personal page.

Google Blog Search: Google Blog Search is Google’s thecnology applyed to blogs.
Google firmly believes in the blog self-publishing phenomenon, and though Google Blog Search they want to help users to explore the blog’s universe in a more efficient way. Are you looking for Harry Potter review, for political comments, summer salad recipes or anything else? Google Blog Search allows you to find what others have written on the subject.
Becuase Google’s results are constanty updated with the latest findings, you will always have precise and updated results.

Technorati: Technorati is a search engine service launched in June 2002.
Technorati used to focus solely on blogs, but now the service allows you to find the most relevant results on all media, including blogs, photos, videos and audio files.
Technorati Search and Technorati Advanced Search are both very powerful functions. Also, Technorati has a rating system called “Authority” and gives a daily listing of the most searched-for matters and sites.

WordPress.com Stats: WordPress.com Stats is a WordPress plugin that collects stats. There are hundreds of plugins and services which can provide statistics about your visitors. However they are not sublect specific. That’s why Automattic created their own stats system, to focus on just the most popular metrics a blogger wants to track and provide them in a clear and concise interface.
Installing this stats plugin is very simple. All you need is to put in your API Key and the rest goes by itself. Once it’s running, it’ll begin collecting information about your pageviews, which posts and pages are the most popular, where your traffic is coming from, and what people click on when they leave. It’ll also add a link to your dashboard which allows you to see all your stats on a single page.
Finally, because all of the processing and collection runs on Automattic’s servers and not yours, it doesn’t cause any additional load on your hosting account.sw

And And now let’s see forums and user groups. Forums and user groups often mean user generated content (UGC). That is, user propose their own solutions and their software for known problems or requirements. David Berkowitz has produced a good presentation to introduce such issue. Here:

So, here are your tools too handle forums and user groups.

BoardReader: BoardReader

BoardReader: Vivisimo provides enterprises with advanced search solutions, including social search tools that enable collaboration throughout the enterprise, offer application control through easy-to-use interfaces, flexible security management and an easy to use architecture that enables quick deployment.
Vivisimo products are available for standalone search applications or as OEM versions embedded within partner applications and solutions.
BoardReader is an examble of how Vivisimo’s tecnology can be implemented into a stand alone social media search engine focusing on communities.

BoardTracker: BoardTracker>, a Pidgin Technologies property, is a forum search engine, message tracking and instant alerts system designed to provide relevant information quickly and efficiently while ensuring you never miss an important forum thread no matter where or when it is posted.
BoardTracker brings the most targeted audience closer to the boards, by being a search engine only for boards and by supplying a categorized and highly effective searching and browsing experience to users.
BoardTracker can be used in a number of ways. As a search engine in the ‘traditional’ sense. All the information in our database is from forum threads only, all extraneous text on a page is excluded by default which allows use to return even more relevant results without the ’spam’. You can pre-define search terms and preferences and BoardTracker will notify you in a number of ways (email, Jabber, site) as soon as a thread matching your search term is posted on any of the thousands of forums we track.
BoardTracker can be used by unregistered surfers and by registered free & premium accounts for additional useful features. Corporate users can arm their sales and marketing staff with BoardTracker accounts to give them essential business intelligence.

Google Groups: Google Groupsis an almost infineite set of Usenet and proprietary user groups supplyed by Google. The system features Googletracking and mesuremet functions.

http://omgili.com/: http://omgili.com/ is the best way in the known universe to find out what people are saying about anything and everything!

Omgili is your way to find “subjective information“. As opposed to traditional search engines, which search for sites and pages, Omgili finds consumer opinions, debates, discussions, personal experiences, answers and solutions. Most of the questions have already been answered: find the answers through Omgili. Most of the technical problems have been solved: find the solutions through Omgili. Most of the experiences have already been described: Find these descriptions through Omgili.
Omgili is a specialized search engine that focuses on “many to many” user generated content platforms, such as, Forums, Discussion groups, Mailing lists, answer boards and others.

mgili is a crawler based, vertical search engine that scans millions of online discussions worldwide in over 100,000 boards, forums and other discussion based resources. Omgili knows to analyze and differentiate between discussion entities such as topic, title, replies and discussion date.

Additional Omgili services:
Omgili Buzz Graphs: Create chatter graphs about the topics of your choice.
Google@Omgili: Get the best of two worlds: Objective Search (Google) combined with Subjective Search (Omgili).
Omgili Data Feed: The source for online discussions.

Samepoint: As social media has taken on many different forms, Samepoint set up their crawlers to encompass every conceivable type of social media service. Samepoint’s categorization breaks out results by type of social media, scouring the following:
• micro-blogging platforms like Twitter or Identi.ca
• video platforms such as YouTube and DailyMotion
• social bookmarking communities such as Digg and Delicious
• blogs and associated comments
• wikis
• social networks like Facebook, MySpace and Hi5
• B2B networks such as LinkedIn and Plaxo
• User groups like Yahoo! Groups and Google Groups
• Q&A sites, such as Yahoo! Answers and Yedda
• Life casting sites, such as DaveTV
• Review sites, such as Yelp and CitySearch
• Podcasts
• Documents
• Images
• News
• Events
• Web sites
Samepoint utilizes it’s unique technology to bring conversations together from multiple sources to one defined point.

Yahoo! Groups: Yahoo! Groups are Yahoo!’s user and Usenet generated set of groups. Applications allow to customize them, including search functions.

And once more we came to the end of today’s post, but beware, we definitely aren’t trough yet. Next post is coming ASAP.

Alex Badalic