One of the best ways to get the most out of RSS is to set up customized keywords to track the specific companies, industries, products and topics of greatest interest to you.

One firm that’s already done the work of putting together dozens of these specific feeds, culling stories from hundreds of high quality, substantive online news sites is Moreover.

Moreover has been a known name in the customized online news tracking for several years, though seemed a bit slower to hop on the blog bandwagon, though a spokesperson told me that the firm will be adding blogs to its online news tracking shortly.

In the meantime, you can find and collect those nice business specific feeds right now by clicking right here.

By the way, this site was one of the selection of this month’s Best of the Business Web, the free monthly email newsletter that I do each month that identifies and describes five of my favorite business research oriented sites. (If you’d like to receive it, just click on that above link).

Technorati Tags: Moreover Technologies

Technorati Tags: RSS

I pay extremely close attention to whatever I read in The Economist.

It’s on the short list of my most trusted information sources.

So when The Economist publishes a special report (or one of its “surveys”) on Web 2.0, I pay very
close attention indeed.

And that is exactly what The Economist had done in its April 20th edition…AND, it’s all on the Web, right here, in this piece: Among the Audience.

I’ll be posting what I feel its most important and noteworthy observations were, but I’d also be very interested in yours–please let me know!

As we move to the Web 2.0 world of user-created content and new notions of who should count as an “authority”, we all are bound to wonder about the believability and credibility of user reviews we come across on Amazon, Epinions, and all the other sites where anyone can rate information or tangible products.

I was recently alerted to a fascinating scholarly study of the credibility of Internet based user reviews that was published last month in First Monday, the outstanding peer reviewed journal of Internet technology and society. In that piece, which was titled, Six Degrees of Reputation, the authors used observation and special software to analyzed over 50,000 user reviews on over 10,000 books and CDs from Amazon.com

It’s worth reading the entire piece, but authors Shay David and Trevor Pinch noted at the outset of the piece that: “A preliminary literature search revealed that beyond our own experience, recent evidence suggested that many reviews are not authentic, that users are using various techniques to game the system, and that this phenomena might be widespread.”

A key conclusion of the author’s study was that:

“users who write product reviews are engaged in a variety of activities: promoting agendas, carrying out personal attacks, boosting their own and others reputations, building their own identities as reviewers, experiencing for the first time the empowerment of publication and so on”

Interestingly, the authors found one particularly common process was duplication of reviews or what they termed “self plagiarism.” Noted the authors:

“Our findings allow us to estimate that about one percent of all review data is duplicated, verbatim or with variations. The similar patterns observed across different genres of books and CD suggests that our findings will be corroborated with larger datasets”

There’s nothing completely surprising in this study, but it’s important to read. As we move into a world where business sources with increasing value also come to be rated by ordinary people on the Web—research reports, databases, new journals, it is important to be able to spot those who try to “game” the system, and tell the credible reviewers from those who are primarily only trying to achieve narrower self-interested aims.

Technorati Tag: Reputation Systems

This whole recent burst of discussion about how we’re all in an attention economy is very interesting, but actually nothing all that new.

Although this was the hot topic at the recent O’’Reilly Emerging Technologies conference in San Diego, the fact is, Thomas H. Davenport and John Beck co-authored an excellent book, The Attention Economy: Understanding the New Currency of Business, (Harvard Business Press) way back in 2001. In that book, the authors discuss how our scattered and diffused attention has become the scarce resource that marketers must learn how to capture. And the peer-reviewed digital scholarly journal First Monday wrote about it in 1997.

Today, this meme is getting new a new life in Web 2.0 several different ways:

* As part of the reputation management discipline. Reputation and where attention is being “spent” are closely related.

* By the use of the phrase “continuous partial attention”” to describe the multitasking method of Net users, particularly younger ones, to pay primary attention to one element in view, while monitoring everything else in the periphery

* By the claim by some that speakers, professors, and others do not automatically deserve an audience’s undivided attention, but must earn it by being compelling and more interesting than whatever those in the audience can locate virtually (eg emails, IMs, Web browsing, flick photos, etc.). In this philosophy, physical presence has no greater claim on one’’s attention then a virtual presence

* A movement by some to “take back” one’’s measurements of attention, measured primarily by clickstreams and Web pages browsed, as a valuable commodity whose ownership should not just be made freely available to marketers and search engines for sale to the highest bidding, but to the individual. Services like Root Vaults and AttentionTrust are making the ability to reclaim that “attention data” possible for Web users.

On this topic, I recommend reading Steve Rubel’s very interesting post on how organization can track where a designated group’s attention is being “spent” via using some digital tools like FeedBlendr and FeedBurner

Technorati Tag: Attention Economy