From Information to Intelligence

When getting back home, I was thinking about blogs value for competitive intelligence. Technorati rank them by link pointed to it. It’s like Google page rank or HITS algorithm. Of course this make sense for credibility and it is provides a quantitative value for a blog. However it does not tell you how valuable the information is.

Applying the information type to blog and the Bradford law to blog I guess we can determine the value of a blog by this rule of thumb :

“If the blogs are ranked by the value of their information then for a given subject a minority publish the majority of the valuable information. ”

Intuitively this rule is explained by the nature of the information exposed by blogs, a vast majority just report white information in an unfiltered manner. More valuable are those how report white aggregated and filtred information. Reported by addict they are more reliable as they seek to separate the true from the false. Few blogs actually report grey information that are only available to a minority. This include conference reports or experimentation. These blogs are made by experts that have the time the money and the knowledge to target the most valuable information. Finally the most valuable information is produce by the people that made it. For instance a Windows vista developer about vista feature because he know it from the inside.

Here is a diagram that represent that idea. Hope you find it useful.