Blogs for Idea Mining

Blogs are a great source of ideas. Some of the bloggers are the smartest people I know. They comment about products. They track trends. They predict future products. They compare and categorize. And they share it all free.

So how about mining ideas from blogs? And using them to improve your products, projects. For example if you look at a list of mashups, you will certainly get ideas for other mashups. If you enjoy using Web 2.0 products, you already know a specific user interface you like. By tracking the most popular Web 2.0 products, you are getting some free market research. All these are talked about in the blogosphere.

Blogosphere is a gold-mine for ideas. Here are some simple things to do:

– Identify the experts (this is easy to do in any specific area)

– Subscribe or track their blogs

– Track the blogs they read (these are called blog rolls)

– Find product managers who blog (in areas of interest to you)

– Find product reviewer's blogs
– Track comments on blogs (For example, when Don Box blogged about Teaching his kids to program he received hundreds of comments)

If you are a developer, you should be able to build your own custom RSS feeds. If you are not, get one of the blog aggregators with filtering capabilities. This is just the first step. What do you think?

11 thoughts on “Blogs for Idea Mining

  1. Cool idea.
    Maybe a microformat for ideas will emerge. And bots will walk and select ideas and implement them. He ha.
    I will surely subscribe for a service that mines ideas and RSS it to me.

    Cheers.
    -Balaji S.

  2. Yeah. Danny Ayers already talked about an RDF model for ideas. I will dig up the link and post it here. I maintained an idea log in xml format for a while (just to keep my ego boosted).

    Bots selecting ideas may not be too far away. The implementing part may be much farther off -:)

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