A
project I'm moving off the back-burner and into the public domain is a project I called Tech Blogger Analysis. My GF is Audrey Watters @ ReadWriteWeb, so I get exposed to an authors daily perspective in the tech blogging world.
I started harvesting all the RSS feeds from
ReadWriteWeb,
Techcrunch,
O'Reilly,
Mashable,
VentureBeat, and
GigaOm.
Upon harvest I would organize the post and curate author details, tags, etc. I had a whole bunch of scripts I'd run to clean up, organize and centralize meta data.
I would then pull the tweets for each post daily using BackType.
I would then build profiles for each twitter user with their # of followers, tweets etc....as well as their Trustrnk using InfoChimps.
When I started I was profile the individual blogs, and quickly saw the true value is in the tech blogger and their brand. I think there is an important story here:
- What topics to they cover most? Specialize in?
- Who has the strong brand? Number of Followers? Importance in certain topics.
- Who are their influential followers? Loyalty? Trustrnk?
- What do their followers pay attention to?
There is a lot of information here. I had the data harvesting for last 6 months, it was being refined and had a crude web interface setup. I wanted to provide a directory of Tech Bloggers and their brands with real-time stats on what they are writing on their personal and professional blogs. Think Postrank, BackType, Crunchbase for Bloggers.
I think the future of tech journalism is about the individual writers and their brands. I think writers would find this information valuable. I also think industry leaders would find this information valuable also. I see a lot of corporations investing in tech writers and their brand. I see writer brands becoming just as, or more important than the domain based brands we see today.
I would like to restart this project, but just can't afford the EC2, RDS and bandwidth charges if I'm not moving forward. If you are interested, you can contact me.
