Competitio.us : intelligence monitoring
TechCrunch have a write up on a focused based service called Competitio.us.
It’s a place where you can keep track of competitor websites, all you need to do is enter URL’s, more from TechCrunch:
“…add competitors by home page URL. Competitio.us hits the web and brings back each company’s blog, recent blog posts, related blog posts from off site and detailed traffic data from Alexa.”
You can also clip these blog posts to a clipping section and be notified by RSS, and there is also a feature comparison chart.
This is a focused piece of newsmastering, usually we are putting together topic news pages via re-syndicating feeds, instead this service not only gives you recent posts, but a profile as well.
Without Competitio.us we could use an RSS Reader and subscribe to the feeds of each competitor, and a statistics feed…or choose to display these feeds in a Public RSS Reader (eg. SuprGlu, MySyndicaat, Bozpages, Blogdigger Groups), or in a public widget display (eg. Speedyfeeds), or in a public/private startpage (eg. Pageflakes, Protopage), or a profile page (eg. Ziki).
Competitio.us brings this desire or need into a focused space, where we can have an intelligence dashboard product, and then do things with that information, eg. clippings, set permissions.
Basically this is enhanced profiling, maybe this is the web 2.0 version of DIY Hoovers.
Besides profiling, and statistics, the main thing is be able to track mentions of competitors, this involves scanning the news, blogosphere, podosphere, journal databases, social bookmarks, general web, repositories, papers, etc…and to do this you need to be able to make scraped feed (eg. Ponyfish), filtered feeds (eg. Feed Digest), and use a web monitoring service (eg. Feedwhip, WatchThatPage).
Then these efforts can be presented in an RSS Reader, Public RSS Reader, wiki, webpage, public/private start page, public widget page, etc…and the ability to be alerted by systems tray (eg. Alert Bear, RSS to email IM SMS (eg. Rasasa, ZapTXT), etc…
So for me, CI (Competitive Intelligence) is profiling, tracking, reporting…and if all these tools are not built in, they at least need to be available as 3rd party add ons.
Great to see services starting to specialise…we don’t need another startpage, bookmarks, re-syndicated river of news page, etc…we need focused versions of these services to serve special needs, and Competitio.us does exactly that!
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