I am at the KMWorld conference in Santa Clara.

Arik is up. His slideshow is titled "Competitive Intelligence Weblogs: Building Market Monitoring Capabilities with Rapid Analysis Tools". Subtitled: Using weblogs to accelerate delivery of recommendations to decision makers and enhance current awareness and early warning.

Twelve application priorities of CI. Current Competitor Activities and Strategy Monitoring. Customers, Vendors and Other External Monitoring. Operational Performance Benchmarking. Product/ Service sales and marketing support. Strategic probabilities and possible futures. Internal KM. Intellectual property exploitation and protection. Mergers and acquisitions . . .

Weblogs a tool for fast analysis. 80% of necessary competitive intelligence already exists within the firm. Creates de facto communities of practice around CI priorities. Functions as an current awareness or early warning intelligence newsletter. Use specific blogs to publish recommendations for select people in the company.

Shows architectural process. Produce current awareness from some sort of a newsfeed (e.g., XML newsfeed from news sources like LexisNexis); analyst acts as a human filter adding commentary and summary analysis; makes recommendations and uses RSS feed to function as a content broadcast; provides mechanism for feedback for questions and answers, ad-hoc follow-up with primary sources; and finally, system tweaks such as key intelligence topic overhauls.

Frequency is a key advantage. Can make it a daily deliverable, or can aggregate it into a less frequent document. Once you have the content repository of daily content, you can repurpose it for weekly summary for CEO or monthly summary for Board.

Subjects that are covered are typically companies in the marketplace. Looks at opportunities and risks. Looks at all competitive factors that affect the organization.

Customers of CI blog in enterprise will range from executives, salesforce, and also product development and R & D, intellectual property, etc.

Also, need to create an alert threshold. Initially, it is better to skip creating a threshold. Later, when blogger is better practiced, can create alerts that are distributed to everyone.

His product, Aurora Recon|G2. Built on Traction TeamPage, with a Moreover XML Newsfeed, and has strong security and authentication, strong RSS XML support.

He uses MoveableType for his personal weblog, which he uses as a marketing tool for his company. Didn't feel it would work in an enterprise setting. Also decided against Frontier / Userland. So, Traction is what they use for the enterprise tools.

Aurora's primary targets its initial rollout to sales force intelligence: pitch support, low hanging fruit analysis, cross-selling opportunities, dealing with FUD, etc.

Four challenges for intelligence: 1) collect organize and analyze information from scatter internal and external sources. 2) Provide market and competitive updates. 3) Respond to questions and request. 4) Write though pieces to guide the organization.

Current tools: email, file systems, groupware, and CI tools that are not very flexible.

Weblog fits into managing the intelligence process itself. Blog helps intelligence team: collect, connect and synthesize knowledge. Build and grow and self-service intelligence knowledge base.

Blog information feeds downstream teams' information and decision-making flow. Blogs save time and improve efficiency. Removes the plumbing overhead from IT's job.

CI blog process: discover an article, blog the article with analysis, add comments and label to categorize it, publish news page and summary email / RSS, reader asks question (via blog comment), analyst does research and responds to ad hoc request as a blog entry, response published via email / RSS notification.

Downstream teams. CI blogs become a key resource for white papers, strategic planning, etc.

Q & A

Talking about Microsoft's bloggers and possibility that blogging will get built-in to Office or something in the future.

Q about threaded vs flat discussion models, and when each should be used. A: comments in blogs tend to be quick and simple, threaded discussions are useful when lots of comments and back and forth.