Infomart now monitoring blogs, still no RSS
Posted by Keelan on January 3rd, 2007
FPInfomart, a member of the CanWest Group of companies, describes itself as the largest electronic resource of Canadian news and business information products.
FPInformart offers subscribers access to more than 200 national and regional media sources including daily/weekly newspapers, magazines, trade pubs, broadcast transcripts and wires.
I am an FPInfomart subscriber and use it everyday for at least an hour to monitor media coverage on behalf of clients and to read other news that is of interest to me.
I’m glad to see they have added blogs to their monitoring, but they’ve only selected 409 to track across the following categories: Business, Career, Culture, Education, Environment, Finance, Health, Law, Local, Marketing, Media, Politics, Sports, Technology and Transportation.
As of August 2006, Technorati was tracking more than 50 million blogs. So really, how effective/useful is it to monitor 409 blogs? (409 represents about 0.000008% of the blogosphere)
Also, they haven’t indicated how the 409 were selected. Notably missing after only a very quick glance at Infomart’s blog list:
David Akin’s On the Hill. As Parliamentary Correspondent in the Ottawa Bureau of CTV National News and blogger since 2003, you’d figure his blog would have been a sure source under Politics.
Naked Conversations, where Robert Scoble & Shel Israel wrote their corporate blogging book & where Shel is writing Global Neighborhoods.
There were several others that I was surprised to see not being picked up and some odd choices amongst those that are.
In addition, like CanWest papers (National Post, Ottawa Citizen, Montreal Gazette, etc.), Infomart does not offer RSS. The Globe and Mail, CTV.ca, and CBC.ca, to name a few, have been offering RSS for close to a year or more now.
I hope this is Infomart’s first step into blog monitoring and they will continue to grow their list of sources. Taking suggestions from their subscribers would be an easy way to do this.
I also hope Infomart and CanWest papers get with the program and begin to offer RSS, which is long overdue.
January 4th, 2007 » 7:40 am
Any step is a good step, I suppose. I saw this functionality on Infomart, but never even gave it a second thought as I personally have my own blog monitoring set up.
CNW is working hard to engage bloggers in the PR community to help them develop their capabilities as a newswire. I’ve had a brief discussion with CCN about improving their RSS capabilities as well, so at least there is movement.
Are you suggesting that infomart offer subscribers the ability to get alerts by RSS in a similar way as they get alerts by e-mail right now? Or are you looking for something more from them?
January 4th, 2007 » 8:29 am
CanWest/Infomart are in a catch 22 on this.
Infomart is basically a pre-RSS aggregator except you can only select to pull from the sources they offer. That is, you can select not to pull content from all their sources, but can’t add your own.
Its a business for CanWest. Annual, individual subscriptions to infomart are in the hundreds of dollars and organizations, particularly PR firms, often have several subscriptions. Compared to free aggregators or ones that charge a small one-time download fee of $30 or $40.
If CanWest papers begin to offer their content via RSS, Infomart will become redundant. The only reason I still use it is because you can’t effectively monitor CanWest papers any other way. Google RSS Search isn’t bad for this, but not 100% effective.
However, with IE7 having RSS built in, how much longer can CanWest papers avoid offering their web content via RSS?
I think if they want to squeeze a few more years out of Infomart in its current form, they should allow subscribers to receive content and their searches via RSS.
Otherwise, infomart needs to find some other way to add value. The blog monitoring was a nice attempt, but currently not effective. For example, this discussion about Infomart won’t get picked up by Infomart (not really a valid point given my blog is new, but it wouldn’t if we were having it on your blog either).
There is an opportunity for them to do more than just monitor blogs the same way as they monitor papers. If they could find a way to also track the comments, trackbacks, etc. that would be valuable.
January 16th, 2007 » 11:23 am
RSS is one of those things where once you start using it you wonder why everyone else doesn’t use it all the time.
Yet I still find that people who don’t blog themselves are very slow to adopt it.
January 17th, 2007 » 9:55 pm
Agree.
I’m still surprised when I mention it to other PR/communications professionals (whether in an agency or inside an organization) and they don’t seem to know what I’m talking about.
Its a great tool that has really made my life a lot easier.
July 17th, 2007 » 4:41 pm
[...] Back in January, I did a post about FPinfomart adding blogs to their media monitoring service. [...]
July 17th, 2007 » 4:45 pm
[...] Back in January 07, I did a post on Capital PR about FPinfomart adding blogs to their media monitoring service. In it, I commented that FPinfomart and Canwest papers should also be offering RSS. [...]