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IBM The Internet IT

IBM Announces "Blog-Spotting" Software 118

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the keeping-tabs-on-public-opinion dept.
notesdude writes to tell us InternetNews is reporting that IBM has announced new "Blog-Spotting" software that will allow the monitoring of blogs, wikis, news feeds, consumer review sites, newsgroups, and other community-generated content. From the article: "People can share and spread opinions faster than ever before and that's accelerated the impact of public opinion on businesses"
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IBM Announces "Blog-Spotting" Software More

IBM Announces "Blog-Spotting" Software

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  • Another Time Sink (Score:4, Funny)

    by geomon ( 78680 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @01:55PM (#13990320) Homepage Journal
    ...software that will allow the monitoring of blogs, wikis, news feeds, consumer review sites, newsgroups, and other community-generated content..

    Great just what I need to fill those empty hours between my wife, kids, kids activities, work, writing proposals for more work, graduate studies, my property, my animals, and my hobbies.

    I just abandon that huge waste of time I call sleep so that I can stay current on my Blog-Spotting.

    • Blogspotting (Score:5, Funny)

      by Kelson ( 129150 ) * on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @01:58PM (#13990353) Homepage Journal

      This reminds me of something [imdb.com]...

      Choose life. Choose a job. Choose a career. Choose a family. Choose a fucking big television, choose washing machines, cars, compact disc players and electrical tin openers. Choose good health, low cholesterol, and dental insurance. Choose fixed interest mortgage repayments. Choose a starter home. Choose your friends. Choose leisurewear and matching luggage. Choose a three-piece suite on hire purchase in a range of fucking fabrics. Choose DIY and wondering who the fuck you are on a Sunday morning. Choose sitting on that couch watching mind-numbing, spirit-crushing game shows, stuffing fucking junk food into your mouth. Choose rotting away at the end of it all, pishing your last in a miserable home, nothing more than an embarrassment to the selfish, fucked up brats you spawned to replace yourself. Choose your future. Choose life... But why would I want to do a thing like that? I chose not to choose life. I chose somethin' else. And the reasons? There are no reasons. Who needs reasons when you've got blogs?
    • ...software that will allow the monitoring of blogs, wikis,...

      Greeaaat. Wikis too. The only thing lamer than blogs [asciiartfarts.com].

      • Re:Not just blogs (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Taladar ( 717494 )
        Actually Wikis are very useful for storing Documentation. You just have to limit the scope of your Wiki clearly and it is much better than months-old stale documentation just because there is no dedicated documentation maintainer anymore for your project.
        • Agreed - and I'm an active user of both wikis and blogs; I was kind of joking..., the point is though that when I search for information on a topic I would rather not search wikis and blogs.
    • Simple model to measure the meme of corporation reputation -

      http://www.realmeme.com/Main/evilindex/corporation .jsp [realmeme.com]

      A more sophisticated abstract model -

      http://www.realmeme.com/Main/theory101/sentiment.j sp [realmeme.com]

    • the current version of Google desktop is very much similar

  • Evolution of software and the web (Score:5, Informative)

    by Kelson ( 129150 ) * on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @01:55PM (#13990330) Homepage Journal
    This looks like an extension of existing "brand watching" programs that have been around for a year or two. The main difference appears to be automation. AFAIK, existing programs have used some sort of search to find references to a brand, and then humans have looked at the newsgroup/forum/blog/whatever posts to determine the level of positive/negative commentary, look for useful information (or for potential defamation), etc. IBM's main addition seems to be the software to analyze it all.

    Actually, this is probably a lot easier with blogs than with forums, since so many blogs provide RSS or ATOM feeds and there's a huge feed ping/search/index infrastructure in place with sites ranging from Ping-o-Matic to Syndic8 to Feedster and Technorati. So the search part is practically off-the-shelf.

  • Oh boy... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by antarctican ( 301636 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @01:57PM (#13990342) Homepage
    Let the lawsuits begin....

    Yes, you too can now easily track all those slamming your product, no matter how much it might deserve public scorn. Have your lawyer on speed dial, because it's time to stop that pesky public from interfering with your business model by commenting on such silly things as "quality."

    • Re:Oh boy... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ScentCone ( 795499 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @02:16PM (#13990474)
      OK, then try flipping the coin over. People with a vested interest in any topic or movement/entity/organization would want to leverage something like this. Want to see what the dev community thinks about some new twist in GPL v.X? How about watching all of the religious crazies chat boards for misinformation about "intelligent design" and how they're talking about using it in an upcoming election? Or, how about using it to spot the frequency of a given keywork collection to help spot how often (and where) people are bitching enough about something to make it worth your time to provide a service, product, or fix to address it.
      • That's nice and very positive, but I know I'd definitely not want to give up my freedom to criticize a company or product openly, for fear of legal reprimand. "Here, have this right to the freedom of speech, until your internet service provider catches wind of you complaining about bad service and interprets it as a disparaging attack on their company/product." I'd love to see companies use this sort of tool to improve their services/products as a form of feedback. However, that costs the company money/t
    • Yes, you too can now easily track all those slamming your product, no matter how much it might deserve public scorn. Have your lawyer on speed dial, because it's time to stop that pesky public from interfering with your business model by commenting on such silly things as "quality."

      Yes, there would absolutely be no legitimate reason for a company to do this. Blogs, many of which are unsigned, are truly the worlds most reliable source for all information on those evil corporations.

      • Yes, there would absolutely be no legitimate reason for a company to do this. Blogs, many of which are unsigned, are truly the worlds most reliable source for all information on those evil corporations.

        Geez, it seems no one has a sense of humour any more. I guess I should have specifically ended with a </silly> tag....
      • they're a very accurate source on personal experiences with a product. that's often much more important to a person looking to buy something than any study you would care to mention. word of mouth advertising still works, as does word of mouth anti-advertising.
    • As long as the information is true or labeled as opinion and not libelious in anyway, the companies can't shut down someone who is reviewing their product. Look at what happened with Computer Associates tried to put a clause in their EULA that said you weren't allowed to write/publish a bad review of their products.

      All this software will allow companies to do is track the reaction of the public to something they do/release/say or any topic they're interested in. I think you'll find this will be used more as

    • Re:Oh boy... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by schon ( 31600 )
      Have your lawyer on speed dial, because it's time to stop that pesky public from interfering with your business model by commenting on such silly things as "quality."

      OR

      "Have your marketing people on speed dial, so that you can try to take advantage of people's opinions and correct your mistakes before they get too big. Instant global feedback from the people who buy your products."

      I see this as the same as almost any new technology - it can be used for good or for evil.

  • Better use for the technology? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DogDude ( 805747 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @01:58PM (#13990349)
    I'd like to see their "blog spotting software" used in conjuction with search engines so that I can NOT find blogs. They could either work with the big search guys, or incorporate it into a dekstop search client. Either way, I know that there'd be a ton of people such as myself who would use it to avoid the glut of crappy fake-journalist blogs.
    • My current search problem is having to sift through all the sites that duplicate wikipedia content.

      Also, sites have gotten better at being able to fool google with non relevant terms.

    • Re:Better use for the technology? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by garcia ( 6573 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @02:13PM (#13990453)
      Either way, I know that there'd be a ton of people such as myself who would use it to avoid the glut of crappy fake-journalist blogs.

      Why? Depending what you were searching for (especially local establishments that aren't chains) you might come across personal websites or blogs that offer far more informative listings for various businesses than you would find anywhere else.

      Yeah, you may not want to hear my comments about a particular location, but you can at least be safe in the knowledge that regardless of the lack of a Google search presence for a particular location, you will likely find the link (if it exists) for any number of local places.

      I believe that when you search for a local pizza place in my area (Carbone's Pizza Lakeville) you will find me first (with a link to their URL) and then 19 spots down you will find them, sorta...

      Me? I'm all for those results showing up.
      • Blogs are the bane of searching. Like I really want to read what some 15 year old wrote about while on vacation. My guess would be that 95-98% of the blogs out there are pure and utter crap. When I do a search I always get pissed off when I click on a link only to find it's the blog of someone who has nothing better to do than post crap on the internet.

        I'm all for free speech and think that everyone should be able to post whatever they want on the web. However, I would love it if a search engine would allow
      • If you can't find any information in the blog-removed search, then you just turn off that option.
    • Surprisingly, adding "-blog" to your search query will filter out the vast majority of the crap. I wonder if there's a way to automatically add that to every query...

  • Oh joy.... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @01:59PM (#13990355)
    If you can spot it, you can spam it.

    i.e Ikea uses Blogspotter (or it's open-source alternative Spogblotter), finds any blog that mentions Ikea, and likkity-split everyone who visits these blogs can read about the best deals on ottoman's "only at Ikea SATURDAY SATURDAY SATURDAY".
  • they wrote a RSS feed reader?
  • Okay, I went through TFA very quickly, but how does this differ from a simple RSS feed?

    • Re:New? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Jerry Coffin ( 824726 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @02:09PM (#13990427)
      Okay, I went through TFA very quickly, but how does this differ from a simple RSS feed?

      RSS requires a source that provides the RSS feed. Some RSS aggregators do screen-scraping and such to aggregate data from various sources that don't directly support RSS. Most of these, however, need to know quite a bit about a specific non-RSS web site and how it formats its data before they can do much with it.

      The idea here seems to be for the tool to do a search to find all the blogs (and maybe web sites in general) that cover your chosen subject matter, and then have enough "smarts" to do screen-scraping (or something on that order) to provide you with an aggregation on all of them without requiring a lot of prior knowledge about the site and its formatting.

      --
      The universe is a figment of its own imagination.

  • Sounds to me a whole lot like RSS just from IBM. RSS has been around a while and works pretty good. For those who don't know:

    RSS is a format for syndicating news and the content of news-like sites, including major news sites like Wired, news-oriented community sites like Slashdot, and personal weblogs. But it's not just for news. Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the "recent changes" page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision hist
  • Yes, public opinion can affect business more rapidly than ever. That should be motivation for companies to improve, not for developers to create products to PREVENT public opinion. Man, this world is getting sad, sad, sad!
    • Why do you assume that the opinions being expressed are useful and informed?

      I would say it is just as likely that it is an utterly uninformed opinion from someone with little understanding of the facts. Like people endlessly writing about how difficult to use Linux is.

      Why would you ever assume that because it is simple and easy to broadcast your opinions to the entire planet that you actually have anything worth saying?
    • It doesn't have to be used that way. If I ran a company, i'd like to know about potential problems before they became major public relations disasters. Legitimate complaints about the company's products and practices are valuable information. You can't fix a problem if you don't know that it exists.
    • "Yes, public opinion can affect business more rapidly than ever. That should be motivation for companies to improve, not for developers to create products to PREVENT public opinion. Man, this world is getting sad, sad, sad!"

      Thank the profit motive of capitalism and the backward animal tendencies of the human race, both of them in combination make a wonderful world doesn't it?
  • This will help disseminators of dissent to stay once step ahead of oppressive censors in countries like Iran and China. Those guys are playing whack-a-mole and this product will just make the moles move faster.
    • No, this'll make the hammer faster. If the Chinese gov't employs someone to constantly check "China, negative" or "Taiwan, positive" or "Falun Gong, positive" or something, then they just go to those sites, and nail the people responsible (if the people are from China). This makes a site practical for only 2 or 3 messages, as opposed to working until the authorities were tipped off by informers.
      • I wonder if there's a simple work around -- an understanding that a particular HTML code would signify that the software would not notice that page, like the X-No-Archive flag [wikipedia.org], and put the software deep inside IBM where the Chinese government can't get at it?

        Not terribly free and open I admit, and obviously you'd need to trust IBM to do the right thing, but too much transparency is a bad thing, at least for political voices in the Chinese hinterland.
  • ..... Some company will buy this software to help it hunt down blogs made by employees like Mini Microsoft for example.

  • "People can share and spread opinions faster than ever before and that's accelerated the impact of public opinion on businesses"

    I'm finding it difficult to hear myself think in the mad clamour of opinions rattling around the web. At least on /. most of us are techies who might know what were talking about but if you listen to every opinion - well, as the old saying goes, opinions are like assoles, everyone has got one and there mostly full of shit.

    • "People can share and spread opinions faster than ever before and that's accelerated the impact of public opinion on businesses"

      Unless of course, you're name is SONY, in which case it just means you can ignore public opinion faster. :)
  • So how smart is this software really? Do certain words trigger it to adjust a combined "opinion score" for a product or company? If so, what's to stop a competitor from creating a series of blogs that say nothing but "I hate IBM's (insert new product here)" to make it appear as if it's received a negative response from consumers?
  • WebSphere Information Integrator OmniFind Edition - Joins hand in confusing all the developers around the world. Cheers IBM!

  • Sturgeon's Law repealed! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fuzzy12345 ( 745891 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @02:17PM (#13990486)
    Am I the only one left lamenting the general loss of quality in the new media?

    It seems to me that a blog is (usually) a page put up by someone who thinks his ideas are so important that we'll overlook the fact that he can't spel or grammer.

    Recently, I was treated to the idea that Wikipedia (the canonical source of non-canonical information on the Internet) is going to be dead-treed and sent to Africa. On the 'net, its lack of authority is considered acceptable because its defenders say nobody should rely on it exclusively. What happens in the bush? If we were shipping substandard pharmaceuticals to Africa there'd be moral outrage, but substandard info is apparently OK.

    Slashdot? Not news for nerds anymore. Witness the posting counts: They're highest on the non-nerdy posts (which just keep coming). Why do I need ID from every angle on /. when it's on the front page of CNN? But put up an article on routers and DNS, and it's 80 mostly uninformed posts.

    Sturgeon's Law needs to be revised: Now 98% of everything is crap. IBM seems to be building a crapfilter and connecting its users to the wrong output.

    • It seems to me that a blog is (usually) a page put up by someone who thinks his ideas are so important that we'll overlook the fact that he can't spel or grammer.

      It seems to me that this is a stupid generalisation.

      A weblog is nothing more than a website with articles published on a regular basis, arranged in reverse chronological order, usually with the option of commenting.

      How anybody can judge anything about the quality of something merely by knowing that it's a weblog is beyond me. Doesn't t

    • You're free to purchase paper copies of Britannica or Brockhaus or so and send those to Africa instead - I don't think anyone will complain if you do. :)
    • I was treated to the idea that Wikipedia... is going to be dead-treed and sent to Africa

      I'd assume the major reason that Wikipedia is considered non-canonical is the possibility of trolls defacing the page and putting in false information. A book on paper would be difficult to hack remotely. Plus, I assume any dead tree version will go through a formal editing and review process, making it canonical.
    • It seems to me that a blog is (usually) a page put up by someone who thinks his ideas are so important that we'll overlook the fact that he can't spel or grammer.

      Sounds just like people posting on Slashdot ;)

      I think the problem is people only see "blog" as being one particular type: The type where someone runs a blog on a standalone website, and posts opinions that presumably he hopes people will read, but hardly anyone ever does, I agree is rather sad.

      But many of them are read by many people. Not because t
  • This is silly. All you really need to do is take slashdot, have a topic for whatever it is you are interested in and open up the submit queue (no more "Rejected" blues). Then sit back and watch tens of thousands of bored geeks sift the relevant information from the internet and post it.
  • Maybe blogs have finally reached the status of drugs, ala Trainspotting
  • Well, i'm a n00b here at /. as far as posting goes, but here goes:

    Isn't keeping an eye on the big bussiness a good thing? The easier it is for people to spread the word on bussinesses and their tactics, i imagine the more "power" people would have on the consumer market. Granted this softwere could be used as posted above to create negative responses to products, but at the same time we could more easily watch blogs about company actions and polocies. I know I for one am
    • I totally agree. This WebSphere addon simply automates the process of retrieving and vetting feedback from the web. Like any technology, it can be used for good or for evil. It sounds like IBM has also gone out of their way to pull news from multiple channels which sounds good from the surface.
    • The issue here is not people keeping an eye on big business.... It is BIG BUSINESS keeping an eye on what people say (think) about BIG BUSINESS. My opinion here is it is likely to generate alot of Cease and Desist letters to bloggers, websites that host bloggers, and so forth. It may, just may, actually be used to harvest data that will improve services, products, software, etc but I think many companies simply cannot bear to look into the mirror of public opinion without casting rocks.
  • organizations recognize that many employees may feel the same way but may not communicate it overtly, so a balance has been struck for organizations that deploy this system: they trust employees to self-percieve, much different than the most conservative of command and control structures. the management crux of such a system is to throttle messaging so risk is mitigated.. IBM's ceo did have a chat session that had trolls etc, but in the end the openess resonated with employees...
  • Bullshit at the speed of light!
  • Then they might give us the option to not return results from those types of sites and improve their service 100%.

    TWW

  • Hopefully there's some way to filter out sites, because not every blog out there knows what he/she is talking about. There's a lot of knee-jerk talk for product previews, especially in the gaming community. For instance, if I were to look at blogs talking about Zelda for the Gamecube two weeks before it came out, about half the blogs would consist of, "Zelda? More like Celda!!!1! ROFL!!"
  • I already monitor keyword searches of such sites as Technorati, Google Blog Search, IceRocket, and
    BlogPulse using an RSS reader (Sharpreader, in my case).

    IBM's service sounds like it is essentially dong the same thing, and then summarizing the results
    a bit. I don't really see any significant added value over using these existing services.

    • I already monitor keyword searches of such sites as Technorati, Google Blog Search, IceRocket, and BlogPulse

      Add boardtracker [boardtracker.com] to your arsenal - it scans forums and can send you alerts by email and jabber based on your keywords and also has rss feeds of course.

    • Re:This is new? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by shawb ( 16347 )
      The significant added value is in summarizing the results, breaking responses down to positive and negative is something that I doubt any of the sites you mentioned do. It also analyzes trends in discussion, so you can then figure out what is creating buzz and what is a flop.

      Now, this DOES assume that a comuter can analyze written language and pull actual meaning from it. Sarcasm is probably sure to throw a monkey wrench into the whole works, though. Hell, sarcasm is often lost on human readers; I don

  • BlogSpotting (Score:5, Funny)

    by Soko ( 17987 ) on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @02:45PM (#13990707) Homepage
    Choose your life. Choose blogging. Choose a hosting service.
    Choose TypePad or WordPress or some other piss you off
    blogware. Choose to alienate several friends, cow-orkers and
    other people you think you know. Choose to navel gaze. Choose to anal-
    yse yourself almost to death. Choose an inane topic and beat
    it to death with pedantry. Choose to spout off political
    commentary like someone will actually listen. Choose to sound
    like you're someone important, just like the other self-
    important 'me-too!' fuckwads wasting bandwith right along
    with you. Choose Google Ad Sense so we know you're in it "for
    love". Choose comment flamewars lasting long into the night
    Choose blogspam. Choose wasting your life chasing after that
    elusive posting that will make you a 'journalist', pissing
    your hopes and dreams down the drain in an on-line ego trip.
    Choose your future.
    Choose blogspotting.
  • I believe these are called aggrgators - and they com in variety of flavors, e.g. web-based, client-installed, you name it.

    Just to help IBM out, here are a few I'm familiar with - your mileage may vary:

    FeedDemon [bradsoft.com] - yeah, to get your $25 worth it helps to OPML and how to transform XML, but that's what I like about it.

    Straw [nongnu.org] - for when I'm in the Gnome .

    BlogLines [bloglines.com] - web-native but with an API to die for.

    AmphetaDesk [disobey.com] - around for a while, great if you like shooting your foot of in Perl.

    NewsGator [newsgator.com] - for

    • They want it all in one. But more scary, they want it PER PERSON. Am I correct?
      I mean, they are talking about a software. Not a service. That means everyone in their own home/biz will be scanning TONS of sites/feeds all the time in order to find the little that is relevant to them? Be it brand, product, Pop star, wha'eve'..
      If that is correct, if indeed each 'user' will become a little search engine, than it will be a nightmare for sites. Instead of using search engines, people will full "spider" sites on

  • More Legal Landmarks approaching (Score:3, Insightful)

    by serutan ( 259622 ) <snoopdoug AT geekazon DOT com> on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @02:52PM (#13990773) Homepage
    I love how the web screws with everything... national borders, taxation and tariffs, censorship, copyright, "local standards" etc. Lots of existing laws are tacitly based on obsolete assumptions about technology, or the way people behaved when their choices were more limited. The ability of anyone to become a publisher is screwing with the notion of publishing, of what a news organization is, and issues such as libel. If you criticize your boss or your company in a letter to your mom it's no big deal, even if she reads it to her neighbors. But if you put the same information on a website it could become a huge deal.

    Some people flatly declare that anybody with a website is a publisher, period, and is therefore subject to the same rules and responsibilities as Time Warner, period. That argument would have made sense back in the days when the difficulty of becoming a publisher made it reasonable to presume a certain level of sophistication and awareness of the legal liabilities. But it's a stretch to make those same assumptions today about your aunt when she signs up on BlogSpot and starts posting away. It's far too easy for the average person to step on the wrong toes on the web.

    The law should be more like a safety railing than like a minefield. It shouldn't lay traps for plain citizens honestly expressing their personal opinions. It should adjust to people's new capabilities and to the way they naturally act. IANAL and I don't know the legal definition of "damage" from other people's words, but I think it should allow for normal, natural expression on a larger scale than it probably does now, and oblige us to exercise more tolerance toward other people's public statements.

    We are going to be seeing more and more cases of one person or entity attacking another in court because of things said on the Web. The outcomes of those cases will have a huge effect on our freedom to use the web to express opinions. I hope the judges and juries have the wisdom to look beyond single cases and think about the bigger picture. I really don't want the web to be a happy hunting ground for legal predators, waiting for me to make a slip and say the wrong thing so they can take away my house.
  • In the past, you'd have to round people up and convince them to attack the monster on the hill.

    With IBM's new technology, thousands of villagers can be gathered with the click of a button. Added value to pitchfork and torch supplies through direct targeted advertisement.
  • Should be called "IBM WEBSPHERE LITIGATION SERVICES EXPRESS" because that's what it is most likely going to be used for. Fortunate 500 squashing all us that dare to have a publicly held opinion.
  • Just to see who the real villan is behind the various freedom fighters. MO HA HA HAHA
  • ...sounds like some sort of a loathesome cattle disease.

    But then "blog" is hardly an appetizing word in itself.
  • Now if we can just get Google to move blogs downward in searches, that will be a big help. I'm tired of having to track through three layers of bloggers to get to the actual info. Slashdot stories have been suffering from this problem lately. (Earth to Slashdot: we need the ability to moderate stories.)

    Yes, sometimes news breaks on a blog, but mostly, it's just drivel.

  • Donning my tinfoil hat ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kitzilla ( 266382 ) <paperfrog@gma[ ]com ['il.' in gap]> on Wednesday November 09, 2005 @05:10PM (#13992212) Homepage Journal
    Surely I'm not the only one wearing tinfoil here.

    This isn't a consumer "time saver." It's a weapon for corporations to police the internet.

    Plug in this sort of technology and you can keep track of your blogging employeees. Are they bad-mouthing the boss? Obviously engaged in something that the company could claim as intellectual policy? Organizing a union? Busted.

    This will automate the troll for IP and trademark infringments. More amusingly, though: now corporations can keep a sharp eye peeled for misbehaving customers. Bitch abour Mega-Mart's pricing or shoddy products, and you might get a Cease and Desist. Or a slander suit.

    Ah, technology in the service of the powerful! How it warms the hearts of lawyers everywhere.

    Damn, this aluminum beanie gets warm fast.

    • While some of your points are insightful, I don't think companies policing customers is a real threat. IANAL but slander suits aren't that easy anymore. It would be called a slapsuit if they try to outmuscle you with their money when its clear you weren't slandering. Also pure opinion and pure fact (if I recall) are protected from slander. Further more trade libel needs to show that the company was damaged by the libel, so the sites getting sued for that probably wont be small time bloggers being caught up
  • There are a few companies [navastream.com] out there [cyveillance.com] that already provide a service similar to this.
  • Letting governments like China to monitor their people's blog much easier. I'm sure they would buy it in an instant to get rid of dissent opionion faster.

    Don't be fooled by their sales pitch.

  • An acquaintance of mine's startup company tried to do this about 5 years ago, but failed.

    The idea was to do basically what IBM has announced: automated spidering of websites, in an effort to automatically gauge public opinion about a given topic.

    Intended uses were: corporate image monitoring, public relations, marketing, early warning about negative public opinion, politics, etc.

    The distinctive thing is that it used natural language processing, in an effort to learn the tone and emotion behind the writings
  • They need to track how many people find out that some products like Identity Manager is a steaming pile of crap and requires hacks and patches to keep it from barfing. Millions of dollars, years to get working and a lot of the consultants have so little training they don't even have a clue about how little the do know. The first time they do something it's OJT at the customer's expense.

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