There’s so much activity going on these days in the Web 2.0 world, but so far it does not seem to have impacted the traditional market research and investment research worlds.

Other than a couple good blogs by firms like JupiterResearch and Charlene Li at Forrester, I have to wonder when the research vendors will start to try figuring out how to introduce Web 2.0 elements like conversation, sharing and building special interest communities on the Net around their published studies and reports. Similarly, there hasn’t been much action at the market research aggregators either, like MindBranch and MarketResearch.com, though MindBranch does offer an RSS feed.

We’ll just have to wait and see. Have you seen any good examples of Web 2.0 activity in this arena?

Technorati Tag: market research

Sure you may now have your RSS reader set up and humming along nicely, but are you using it to your fullest? For example, are you subscribing not only to your favorite online news and bloggers, but also to custom feeds that are generated by precise keyword searches that surface what bloggers are saying about a particular company, product, industry, or issue?

If not, you can set these up by using Technorati. All you need to do is create your keyword search, run it, and then add the feed generated by Technorati for the keyword(s). Then click to “add to watchlist”, which is Technorati’s own blog watching feature, and scroll down to the RSS icon. You should experiment with the words and phrases (you can even use Boolean protocols by clicking the “options” link to the right of the search box) until you’ve got it the way you want.

That’s all you need to do!

Technorati Tags: blog tracking

For the last week or so I’ve been doing some telephone interviews with key persons in the business information industry to get their thoughts as part of a special issue for the April Information Advisor on how Web 2.0 is impacting business research.

So far there have been two remarks that I feel are particularly interesting. One was from the new CEO of Factiva, Claude Green, who on March 1 took over the position from Clare Hart.

Green told me that Factiva is considering how the firm might eventually try to assist the publishers whose newspapers and journals Factiva includes by electronically tracking how Factiva subscribers are using that content—what stories are they reading, what’s generating the most amount of interest, etc. Of course all of this data will be in aggregate, so there should not be any individual privacy concerns per se.

Still, when data flows from the provider to the publisher–perhaps in realtime– there will be some interesting implications, one being whether future editorial decisions are going to be made from this kind of bottom up news reading behavior…

The other interesting point was made to me by Patrick Spain of HighBeam. Spain, who was a co-founder and CEO of Hoovers, told me that his firm is thinking about ways to get its user base to build custom content collections around one of their passions. The potential topics can be quite niche—everything from the definitive word on, say, a particular World War II battleship, to a hot consumer product, a complex financial investment plan, and so on.

The collection would include not just substantive news and articles from HighPoint’s proprietary collection, but other open source articles, web sites, photos, videos and more. These long tail information packages could then be shared, or monetized via keyword advertising or other techniques, possibly providing some income opportunities for the user who created the collection.

Fascinating stuff…!

Stay tuned for more…

Technorati Tags: Web 2.0

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