Sunday, July 17, 2011

Business Intelligence, the semantic Web and Alltop

My blog is including on the Alltop business intelligence page, and at the time of writing I display their badge on the blog.

According to the site 'The purpose of Alltop is to help you answer the question, “What’s happening?”' Alltop is a 1990's style Web registry maintained by human editors.

But Alltop's business intelligence page has several problems that make it less useful than it could be. The page has fallen victim to a semantic Web style gotcha. Like many other phrases, business intelligence means different things to different people. If you don't disambiguate somehow, a web registry based on a phrase may make no sense.

There are three distinct meanings of the phrase "business intelligence". The first is something about software for analyzing business data -- like my blog. The second is news about businesses, which is interesting but unrelated. These are some of those blogs:

MEED NEWS, EMARKETS.DE, B2B TRADE, DEALBOOK, ARUNDEL BUSINESS NEWS, FOREX TRADING INFO, THE FINANCE KID, ARBITRAGE MAGAZINE, SMALL BUSINESS SUPPORT

The third meaning is based on a completely different meaning of intelligence -- intelligence as in IQ, as opposed to intelligence as in information for analysis. In the sense business intelligence just means being smart about business, which could men just about anything.

So Alltop's business intelligence page contain sites that are not at all related to the #businessintelligence tag on Twitter. A lot of these seem to be advice about sales and entrepreneurship or general management consulting blogs. A few are just political blogs, or blogs about general market or marketing trends. They're fine in their way, I guess, just misplaced. Here's a list:

STATSPOTTING!, WSJ: THE NUMBERS GUY, MANAGE BY WALKING AROUND, BUILDING BUSINESS VALUE, CORPORATE MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES, KNOWLEDGE WORKS, HUSTLEKNOCKIN', THE THINK HERE BLOG, LEAD VIEWS, THE SOLOPRENEUR LIFE, SMEDIO, INTERCALL BLOG, GLOBAL INSTITUTE FOR INSPIRATION, SMALL BUSINESS SUPPORT, RED WING SOFTWARE BLOG, FRED67 B2B REFERRAL CLUB, RESULTS.COM BUSINESS GROWTH TIPS

I'm not criticizing any of these guys, just saying they seem to be improperly categorized.

Also Alltop is syndicating advertising material thinly disguised as blogs. Of course, maybe they're getting paid, what do I know? If not they should be. The following are BI vendors, which may or may not be problem:

RED WING SOFTWARE BLOG, LOGIXML, BIME - SAAS BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE (BI), BLOG.JINFONET.COM, MICROSTRATEGY 101, PANORAMA BUSINESS INTELLIGENCE

In addition, there are several aggregators -- Yahoo, and Beyenetwork twice. These guys can be seen as comptetitors, I guess.

In the end I think that the lack of careful stewardship reduces the usefulness of the site. The problem is that business intelligence is a vague term and needs a semantic Web to be useful. Manual editing in a web registry is a workaround, but it is not being used here to much effect.

7 comments:

Mike Bosch said...

nice post mate.

mattarazi said...

Many day traders sell their positions before the market closed trading day to avoid the risk of price difference (one day closer to opening up the difference between the price of overnight), open it.

First Hour Trading

Unknown said...

Yes It is right.business intelligence means different things to different people

Anonymous said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Anonymous said...

There is significantly surprise this particular simply just released sorts are listed below: uggs estimates boots or shoes
mayfair boot styles girls java Highkoo Microsof corporation 5450 fight-style exceptional.

ì (IE: sand, chestnut, chocolate, black) UGG boots.
Regardless of the items your first options are,
UGG Classic Short you can find in the UGG boot.

My weblog; prada

Martin Lois said...

Great Post, I was looking for something like this one.

rüzgar said...

edremit
ardahan
kırıkkale
kırşehir
tunceli
W1İG

Post a Comment

Please leave a comment