Comments on: Listening for Relevant Noise

By: Joseph Dolson

Joseph Dolson — Sat, 05 May 2007 14:13:29 +0000

Disrespecting the “rules of the road,” as it were, for robot traffic is definitely a cause for offense. There’s a point where a service does more harm to those it uses as sources than it does benefit to those who use the service — and perhaps Relevant Noise crosses that line. Personally, I find it hard to be overly concerned about this particular bot. I don’t have a corporate budget to weight the benefits of the Relevant Noise bot either, but when I compare the work involved in blocking it to the expense involved in not blocking it, I find myself looking at a very petty question. I can spend a petty amount of time working to block the bot, or I can spend nothing on the bandwidth to allow it to continue to have access. If, at some point, I reached a degree of traffic where I was at any risk of exceeding the bandwidth allotted by my hosting, I might reconsider.

By: WillMacc

WillMacc — Sat, 05 May 2007 07:47:47 +0000

The problem I have with Relevant Noise is not with the company, but how the “mining of public data” takes place.
The article I published didn’t go online until it became obvious that a simple robots.txt entry wasn’t worth the effort made.
A last count, bot access = 62 - robots.txt pulled = 2.

“Mining public data” at the rate of 150+ pages in 3 seconds in most of the 62 accesses was the deciding factor in removing the bot’s access and publishing my article(s).
I also contacted a few others that do the same type of blogs as I and nearly all were of the same idea of removing access due to the same problems I was having.
Also since I do not have a corporate budget to pull from and weighing benefits - or the lack of - of the Relevant Noise bot, the choice was pretty clear; at least for me.
Mining Google’s Cache would probably be easier on my budget than not.

By: Longrider » RelevantNoise

Longrider » RelevantNoise — Thu, 11 Jan 2007 18:58:15 +0000

[…] Update: Following on from the comments, it is worth pointing out that relevantNoise are in the business of reputation management. Public outrage risk is something modern businesses have to be aware of and prepare for. However, relevantNoise seem to have got off on the wrong foot as Aimee commenting here on behalf of relevantNoise lets slip: […]

By: Joseph Dolson

Joseph Dolson — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 15:23:35 +0000

Indeed, a lot of people don’t understand the whole concept of mining public data for information: like you say, the information is already out there, you’re just searching it out and analyzing it.

I’ll be honest…I was surprised when I wrote this that I didn’t hear anything from you sooner - made me wonder whether you were using your own services! Of course, since what I wrote was generally positive, there was little reason to charge in…

At any rate, I’m glad to hear from you - hope you can manage to educate people and get rid of some of those unfortunate comparisons.

By: Aimee

Aimee — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 06:11:34 +0000

Sorry it’s taken me a while to comment on this! Your post about us is … well, refreshing! We’re getting a fair amount of flack lately for what we do, so it’s nice to see a post in which we’re not called “spies” or something similar.

I agree (obviously) that there’s value in reputation management…and there are still far too many marketing and PR execs who are unaware of the disasters slowly simmering around their brands in the blogosphere. What we do at relevantNOISE (as I’ve just said elsewhere, and as you’ve mentioned) is not a heck of a lot different than what one would do by setting up Google Alerts and keeping an eye on Technorati — but we provide a much broader, fuller view, allowing (for example) a CMO to monitor several brands (on a keyword basis) at a time. And we’re able to determine things like the overall tone of the posts, volume, etc., which can be viewed graphically via our nifty dashboard.

It’s cool stuff, and we’re really excited about what we’re doing. And we’re honestly dedicated to adhering to industry best practices. (If I sound defensive, it’s only because I really do take offense to the whole Big Brother comparison — we’re not monitoring anything that hasn’t been published and/or syndicated for public viewing already.) And, oh yeah, it’s 1:00 AM. I may just be cranky, too!

As for optimization…yeah, I know. SEO is high on the priority list for 2007!

Thanks again for the post.