From the We’re In Trouble, The Dataminers Are Showing an Interest Dept, a company called Intelliseek (description: “a business intelligence company that leverages a breakthrough technology platform to help marketers, researchers and other business professionals transform unstructured data into insights!”) have pointed their datamining skills at blogs. The result: BlogPulse.
BlogPulse uses the datamining thing — machine-learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques — to comb through massive amounts of text and “look for meaning, trends, spikes and interesting facts”. Gosh, I wish them luck. The vast majority of blogs are unvisited, unappreciated, and, if this one you’re reading is anything to go by, unreadable.
No, seriously, it’s good to see marketing folk actually looking at blogs, which at their best are a repository of repartee and modern thought. But I suspect it’s somewhat typical that, instead of actually reading them and getting a sense of the intellectual flow behind (some of) them, they just throw a massive datamining bot at the whole kaboodle and hope to dig up some interesting “buzz”. Or am I being hopelessly cynical? Intelliseek, let’s hear your version.