Mike Manuel at Media Guerilla points to a post by Randy Charles Morin bemoaning the shortcomings of current blog search engines.
He’s right.
At Harvard PR we’re using blog search for general research and tracking issues, using several search tools analysis tools in parallel. But even then we don’t trust the results completely.
Having your own blog and cross-referencing searches against entries shows the delays and holes in the main search engines.
We have, then, some technical shortcomings to overcome in search. But we also have issues with the way we look at connected media and the way that we attach significance and explain that significance in a meaningful way.
Search and analysis as we have known them for traditional web media isn’t the whole answer. Links are more useful than page hits in understanding influence, but even these don’t give a really useful picture of how connected media works (delighted as I am to have this blog appear in the Pub Sub charts, I’m not sure what it really means).
The analysis tools and models that emerge for marketers need to explore and express the connectedness of connected media. We need new ways of mapping groupings of connected media over time, understanding connected "tribes" and how they work, taking a more anthropological than technological/statistical approach.
More about this later.
Meantime, anyone know of anthropologists studying online communities / social media?
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.