Tracking Tech Trends

If you are a developer, development manager, a software company, a tech startup or an investor, you need some way of tracking short/medium/long term trends. The Google Trends introduction last week made me think about the tools available.

1. Google Trends

This is a great tool for tracking search trends. You can type a single phrase like "venture funding" and get a trend graph. In addition, you can get information about the Top 10 cities, regions and languages for the search. You can also type multiple topics like "venture funding, bootstrapping" and see the relative trends.

2. Alexa Web Search - Top 500

Alexa is an Amazon service that tracks the popularity of web sites. Their traffic rankings method is described here.

Alexa computes traffic rankings by analyzing the Web usage of millions of Alexa Toolbar users. The information is sorted, sifted, anonymized, counted, and computed, until, finally, we get the traffic rankings shown in the Alexa service.

I mostly watch the Top-100 sites, but it may be interesting to track the Top-500. Here are a few tips on how I use it. The rankings give you a sense of who the movers and shakers are. Do a bit of extrapolation based on which industries they belong to and you get some ideas on what is going on. For example, many web 2.0 companies - myspace, facebook etc. are moving up. Alexa provides RSS feeds for many of its services.

3. Blog Trends with Technorati

Type a search term, say "Java" in the search link. Then click "more" below the chart displayed on the left of the page. You will get to a page like this. Now you can refine the search a bit using the various options in "authority" and blog type. This is a pretty neat tool. Till I tried it out, I did not even know that bloggers are ranked by authority.

Technorati also publishes some interesting white papers on the emerging trends on use of blogs.

4. PubSub

Another very useful resource is PubSub. You can subscribe to keywords/phrases and receive alerts. My favorite part of this site is PubStats.

PubSub monitors millions of feeds. By generating a list of all the URLs contained in entries of each feed, it's possible to determine a site's relevance just from the number of incoming links it has. LinkRank goes one step further and calculates a score for each linking site. Sites are then scored based on the score of the sites that link to them.

5. Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a collaborative bookmarking service. It allows people to store their bookmarks and tag them. As a user, you can retrieve your own bookmarks, popular ones and others' by using tags. The level of activity and popularity provide you with an idea on some of the short term trends.

6. Diggdot.us

Diggdot.us combines Digg.com, Slashdot and del.icio.us to provide an integrated site for tracking the most popular technology related posts.

7. Tag Clouds

Over the past year or so, tagging is gaining popularity. Several services including Yahoo, Technorati provide tag clouds. A tag cloud is a list of tags displayed in a box. The tags used more heavily have bigger fonts. Here is an a tag cloud on Web 2.0 from technorati.

Tag clouds provide great visualization for popular tags. There are tag cloud animations that show you how the tag popularity increases over a period of time. Here is one of the most popular tag cloud animations from Jon Udell.

There are various other methods:

- Tracking mashup activity,

- Following TechCrunch and eHub,

- Tracking booklists,

- Using Google/Yahoo alerts,

- Watching user group activity

Ultimately the velocity of information in the media will give you a pretty good idea about the really short term trends.

Tech Mining

I have been a reading a book  called Tech Mining. I was planning to write a few blogs after finishing the book. But the whole purpose of my learn log is to (b)log as I learn. So here some information from the first couple of chapters. 

According to the authors, various types of Technology Analyses can be aided by tech mining.

1. Technology Monitoring(also known as technology watch or environmental scanning) - cataloguing, characterizing, and interpreting technology development activities.

2. Competitive Technology Intelligence(CTI) - finding out "Who is doing what?"

3. Technology Forecasting - anticipating possible future development path for particular technologies

4. Technology Roadmapping - tracking evolutionary steps in related technologies and, sometimes, product families.

5. Technology Assessment - anticipating the possible, unintended, indirect, and delayed consequences of particular technology changes.

6. Technology Foresight - startegic planning(especially national) with emphasis on technology roles and priorities

7. Technology Process Managment - getting people making decisions about technology

8. Science and Technology Indicators - time series that track advances in national (or other) technological capabilities. 

We do a bit of the first activity with our product InfoMinder, but have a long way to go in provide the other capabilities mentioned above. We do plan to help customers set up Information Portals to store the tracked information and do some automatic linking. 

Web as a Personal Learning Center

In a presentation to eLearning forum, Stephen does an amazing job of talking about the convergence of various technologies and trends.

The Interactive Web according to Stephen is changing.

From medium to platform

From static to dynamic

From a communication medium to a network of interactions, resources

From centralized to distributed resource descriptions

In addition to demystifying web 2.0, Stephen describes the new challenges germinating from these shifts.

List of Lists

Talk about co-incidence. Just a couple of days ago, I was thinking of putting together a list of lists. I even started creating a page. Today I happened to go to ResearchBuzz and found Lots of Lists with Listable. Check out the listables’ lists.