12
February
2005
|
15:01 PM
America/Los_Angeles

Jupiter analyst: What Technorati can offer Google


The day before the Bloglines-Ask Jeeves deal was formally announced, I talked to Jupiter analyst Eric Peterson. Eric said it made a lot of sense for large search engine companies to start gobbling up RSS aggregators.


"It really seems like Google would want to add something like Technorati that uses the relevance mechanism for searching," Eric told me. "When people search they're looking for both widley linked to and new stuff. There's a great opportunity for Google to apply the news.google.com technology to the blogosphere. RSS search would fit well into Gmail's threaded conversation mode.


Google lets you search the Web; Google desktop lets you search your information on your hard disk. Why not search my RSS subscriptions? Or search all the blogs linked to by people I subscribe to? "That's what Google would do well," Eric said. "Microsoft could do that as well. Yahoo already has their rss reader. If you win eyeballs, you win loyalty.

Back in December Eric had reported on Mark Fletcher's emerging business model ("Adsense on steroids ... the idea that any article or feed I'm interested in will be littered with content that can be mined and transformed into relevant pay-per-click advertising".)


It now looks like AskJeeves is not interested in the "Adsense on steroids" approach and has said that "in some scenarios Bloglines would not have to generate revenue." But speaking of Google, would you put it past them to try that model?


Ultimately, it may be a good thing for the corporate adoption of blogs for the big boys to play in this space, because the lack of qualitative information about blogs is a problem. Eric says: "While there is some high-profile corporate blogging out there (GM and Sun), by and large Fortune 500 corps are not blogging, and because the activity is so difficult to quantify it's hard for analysts to offer much guidance...What's the value of the chief executive blogging? It's hard to quantify. What's the adoption of our syndicated content? Who's linking to us? Is what they're saying positive or negative?"


If you're asked these questions by your boss, your answer is always going to be qualitative, anecdotal, seat of the pants stuff. The quantitative measurements/tools just aren't there yet.


For instance, how do you measure how many RSS subscribers you have? Really the only way to do it is via Feedburner, which works for individuals and small organizations, but "by the time a big organization figures out how to do RSS through their CMS, they're not going to run those feeds through Feedburner. ... It is very difficult to know who's linking to you ... it's a simple problem to solve when you look at, nobody's looking at it."


At a more basic level, RSS won't achieve serious uptake until subscribing is a one-button affair. For starters, no average user would know what to make of those XML buttons, or what to do when the browser asks what application it should open the .rdf file in, or simply displays raw XML code.


Eric thinks this is an opening for the browser makers. "It gives them a chance to solve a problem and create a relationship. It requires a concerted effort of browser makers thinking about how do we solve this problem. There's no way that it's hard. Microsoft has to figure out how RSS is critical to their browser and how they can leverage a simple and pleasing user experience within their browser. "

TF12:14