Use of Weblogs for Competitive Intelligence | First International Business, Technology CI Conference, Tokyo Oct 2005
Abstract: Over
the past fifty years, the inspiration of hypertext systems has been the
challenge of dealing with an ever-increasing volume of information.
Use of Weblogs for Competitive Intelligence (full paper 853K .
by Greg Lloyd
The
First International Conference/
Nihon University, Tokyo 25 Oct 2005
Introduction
Weblogs
(or “blogs”) are best known as personal daybooks on the web written by
an individual consisting of a “collection of clippings, musings and
other things like journal entries that strike one's fancy or titillate
one's curiosity.
Weblogs
gained mass media attention as personally published websites written by
amateur reporters, pundits – or teenagers.
This paper presents the following thesis:
1)
The World Wide Web’s shift to medium that is generally writable as well
as readable represents a return to the original vision of the WWW and
hypertext systems that pre-date the Web.
2) Weblog technology
will not be limited to personal use, but holds the potential to
profoundly change the way that commercial and government enterprises
handle internally facing and externally facing working communication.
3)
Collection, analysis, and dissemination are classic parts of the
Competitive Intelligence (CI) process, and particularly well suited to
the strengths of weblog technology.
4) Weblog technology can
deliver a higher volume of CI alerts and analysis to a wider audience
more effectively than email or any known alternative.
By
creating easily authored content and commentary within the weblog and
linking to any Web addressable content, weblogs create an open and
scalable resource that can be used for notification and reference, as
well as mined for historical insight across the largest enterprise.
Weblog - the NLS Journal Revisited
The
central thesis of this paper is that the weblog format provides a
stable, open journal, which links and comments on the intelligence,
dialog, and work product contained within the weblog, while connecting
to all sources addressable on the public or a private Web.
Because
the weblog is itself part of the public (or private) Web it can
preserve a stable, addressable set of references, which can be linked
to by any other Web source, or analyzed by any application that has
permission to address that weblog’s content.
The time ordered and uniquely identifiable
articles (or posts) within the weblog correspond directly to individual
documents with the NLS Journal.
Any
link to content external to the weblog is subject to the same
uncertainty as any other link in Berners-Lee’s web – content can change
or abruptly disappear at the whim of the publisher, by accident, or if
the publisher goes out of business.
It
is also possible to deploy weblog products that can clip and retain an
independent record of valuable but potentially transitory facts or
documents (used subject to copyright law), or post a brief independent
summary to a weblog.
The last point is worth analyzing.
Millions of human eyes and their agents
constantly scan and evaluate items posted to the public Web using Web
search, notification, and social tagging engines to focus on a
particular topic.
A note and link from a weblog also
adds a measure of statistical redundancy to the unreliable Web.
Like
Berners-Lee’s original concept of the Web, use of weblogs and wikis as
easily deployed and relatively stable authored indices to arbitrary Web
content is a pragmatic compromise.
Copyright © 2005 Gregory R.
Some rights reserved, distributed under terms of the
Full Paper (853KB .
Abstract and Reference sections
Powerpoint slides and additional references (6.
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