Which Enterprise 2.0 Users Are Talking About What and Who, Now and Then?

On his blog, I'm Not Actually a Geek, Hutch from Connectbeam writes "How Are Enterprise 2.0 Vendors Pitching Web 2.0? Using Wordle to Find Out. Here's another great tool that transforms the problem of having "Too Much Information" to not having enough!

Hutch uses Wordle to show us what 10 leading enterprise 2.0 vendors are talking about:

I thought I would give it a try on our own site to see how we differs from the mean:

The Wordles are scoped to the 10 or so most recent pages coming off of RSS feeds and are keyed to all words in each page. That explains why "Understandascope" is so prominently figured in our Worlde - I wrote a Case Study about a site called the Understandascope just last week.

It's interesting both to look at similarities as well as differences. The difference also demonstrates how you have to get into the weeds to understand how a community is forming - in this case a community of vendors and thought leaders.

From a technology vantage point, the Wordles do a very nice job of showing how search collides with blog and wiki authoring to provide useful solutions to business problems. The TeamPage Attivio® Search Module builds navigators for each search which displays entity clouds for implicit meta data such as Keywords (prominent nouns and noun phrases found in text), Companies, Names, and Places as well as explicit meta data such as Projects (wikis / blog spaces), Labels / Tags, and Authors. You can also explore drill down on different time slices to see how results may differ when you look at the oldest 25% vs. the newest 25% of the results.

In the example above, an Author cloud is displayed to show us who is writing the most content that matches a given search request that had 8,231 hits on our own server. This offers quick clues about who is writing about these topics and, thus, who might be the experts. It also offers a means to drill down on authors of interest, or click to see their Personal Profile Pages. After applying a filter, a new set of search results appear in the body and entities will appear in the navigators.

Tag Clouds which show tag strength over all time paved the way for users to see the value of visualizing results. Further extensions of that idea, like the TeamPage Attivio® Search Module and Wordle show how this concept extends to help answer questions, solve problems, and find experts when you need to collaborate across boundaries.