Zibb Team Blog

B2B Search Terrain: Supporting all the Participants of NaNoWriMo 2009

2009-11-02T06:31:00.000-08:00

Each November an amazing event (http://www.nanowrimo.org) rolls around that challenges any aspiring writer, casual writer, or insanely crazy person to write a 50,000 word novel in 30 days. In an effort to show my support to these participants during this grueling month I will be blogging "frequently" on topics related to B2B Search. While I know I won't keep pace (1,700 words per day) with the true writers in this world, I would like to show my allegiance by contributing to this blog several times a week.

The B2B Search Terrain will cover topics that relate to business-to-business search. At Zibb we have been doing search for over four years. But it's not just about search; so much of what we do is because we have a search environment that allows us this amazing opportunity to look at the innards of content and create powerful products for our B2B customers. Some of the topics that will be up for blogging are:

* Lead Generation
* Directory Search
* B2B Search
* Net Neutrality
* Website Registration
* B2B Editorial Content
* Cloud Computing in Search
* Other Search Engines
* B2B Industry News
* Building Sites on Search

For a few of these topics I will be asking my colleagues to weigh in with their thoughts and opinions. Many of these topics will be observations and live examples of how we at Zibb handle a problem and come up with solid solutions for our B2B customers.

Best of luck to all those NaNoWriMo novelists or as my boss would say, "bash on"!

Not Invented Here! Zibb invites OneRiot over for dinner and drinks

2009-10-09T13:09:00.000-07:00

We do a lot of great search things here at Zibb. We don't have to be humble about that since 1) no one reads our blog and 2) we really do have a great team building great opportunities for our consumers!

But one thing we do particularly well is to recognize great work when we see it. We are going to start highlighting those great accomplishments of others and providing unasked for feedback and sparkling commentary. When it makes sense and we can work it out we'll also team up with those great achievers to bring their ideas and services into play for our own users and communities.

The first such team up is with our new friends over at OneRiot (http://www.oneriot.com). They launched about a year ago and pretty quickly caught our attention. They focus on "buzzed about" stories using their own PulseRank algorithm and this produces a very unique perspective on any topic. Here at Zibb, using results from our own engine, we can tell you all about Google and Google Wave; oh boy we got news coverage going back to the first announcement of Google's latest gizmo; but what we don't tell you is what the world "thinks" of Google Wave as a whole. We believe that when you add OneRiot's social perspective to our own high-quality, semantically enhanced results, you get something synergistic; better together to benefit our B2B users who need to keep up on both the companies, products and trends in their market.

It becomes massively interesting to combine the full coverage of a topic with the bits that drive the crowd wild. OneRiot+Zibb is just that. Starting today you will get OneRiot results on the same page with Zibb.com results for any keyword you search for; Try http://www.zibb.com/all/search/all?q=apple+tablet. Oh, and we've added lots of OneRiot-y spice to our hot topic pages. Take a look at http://www.zibb.com/all/hot-topic/sidewiki. You say you didn't know we had hot topics? We periodically create these specialty pages around trending topics and now we are including the social Pulse of the universe by adding OneRiot results to those pages as well. Here's one we did for our buds at OneRiot: http://www.zibb.com/all/hot-topic/oneriot.

What now? Well, we're going to keep pushing OneRiot into more places on Zibb.com; we'll talk to the 150+ Zibb On Demand customers who use our search-based products on their own websites and let then in on the action; and as always we'll add a few new and innovative spins in just to keep it interesting. So welcome to Zibb OneRiot! Who's next? We've already integrated a few other search friends, so stay tuned as we continue to build and partner up to create the best B2B vertical search experience. And feel free to talk to us if you think you have something to bring to the table.

About OneRiot
OneRiot, a realtime search engine, helps users find the news, blogs and videos that people are buzzing about. OneRiot ranks its search results using PulseRank, a realtime ranking algorithm that sorts web content according to its current social significance. By indexing pages shared by millions of Digg, Twitter, and wider social web users - including the contributions of OneRiot’s own three million-strong panel - OneRiot delivers fresh, hyper-relevant search results that answer the question: what is happening right now? For more information: www.oneriot.com.

About Zibb.com
Zibb, a search engine, helps their B2B audience find high-quality relevant content within their industry to best address their needs for researching topics, companies and products. Zibb combines company white page information with relevant news, blogs, whitepapers and company websites all organized and annotated by industry. When you search for chips, you might want silicon, you might want potato crisps, or you might want an old tv series about the California Highway Patrol. Zibb knows the difference and will help you cut to the most relevant results. For more information: www.zibb.com.

About Reed Business
A member of the Reed Elsevier plc group, Reed Business is the largest business-to-business publisher in the world. We have a portfolio of more than 200 market leading publications, newsletters, directories and reference books, electronic products, online services, industry conferences and awards, covering over 25 markets in the USA, UK, and Asia. Publishing many of the leading names in business publishing, including Variety, EDN, Computer Weekly, Design News, RCD, totaljobs.com, Estates Gazette, New Scientist, Flight International, Kellysearch, The Bankers' Almanac, Mardev and DM2, Reed Business has annual sales of over £2 billion. Our market leadership stems from a focus on product quality, innovation, editorial excellence, staff training and development, and the customer. This ensures that we continue to offer the most creative marketing and effective business solutions. For more information: www.reedbusiness.com

Continuous improvement or trial and error?

2009-03-23T09:02:00.000-07:00

We do a lot of work on our site without a lot of talking, as demonstrated by this blog, but I thought I'd highlight a few recent changes we've made and let you know that we're moving "stuff" around. We're changing what we show you and in general just trying out a lot of different approaches to improve our experience for you our highly valued audience.

We do this all the time; minor changes to our pages, our content and our presentation occur almost every week. For presentation and page structure we do it weekly during our code release, for the content itself, we make changes to the index results near-daily and update how it gets organized a few times a month. The result is an ever changing eco-system of search results and pages that should you all find the best of the b2b web however you look for it and whatever your goal and role may be...

We'll put together a few posts to talk specifics about our product research, buy and company profile pages; honestly right now they might still need a little explaining as we move closer and further from the most intuitive version we can think of. The goal is of course for these pages to be clear and speak for themselves, but we have so much information at times it can be like drinking from a fire hose!

At the highest levels what you will see is that we have started to break apart our monolithic zibb.com and organize all the supplier/directory style data into our 26 industries organized by country. An example of that would be a supplier drill down page such as this:
http://manufacturing.zibb.com/suppliers/Pallets+and+Palletizers/us/25798761

You'll notice that this gives you a very different view/experience from just searching for pallet suppliers via regular search. This is intentional, we assure you.

Next up? We need to simplify the presentation and add in some more whitespace. Readability and usability could use a spruce up around all the data we've revealed. Got an idea? Let us know what you'd like to see/or not like to see. We read all the feedback and do our best to incorporate all your great ideas directly into Zibb.

Variety Widget

2009-02-24T11:22:00.000-08:00

So here is that embeddable widget of Variety content that I mentioned a few hours ago. Thought I'd try showing it off embedded right here in this post:

That was taken directly from http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=widget

Get ‘Hollywood On Demand’ With Variety iPhone App & Widget

2009-02-24T08:36:00.000-08:00

Real-time Tinseltown buzz now available on iPhone and any website thanks to NewsGator and RB Searchs’ Zibb on Demand

DENVER, Feb. 24, 2009 — Variety, the premier source of business news covering the entertainment and media industry is offering readers non-stop access to the most compelling entertainment industry buzz via a new Variety iPhone App and online widget.

Developed using NewsGator content syndication services and RB Searchs’ Zibb on Demand search engine, Variety can now deliver the most timely and credible news and analysis to its loyal followers whether they are at home, at work or on the road.

“Our audience includes some of the world’s most powerful professionals and busiest stars, all of whom want information as and when it happens,” said Neil Stiles, president and publisher of the Variety Group. “Our new Variety iPhone App and Variety Widget meet this need, giving us a competitive advantage, and offering our readers greater choice in a market with an ever increasing number of media outlets.”

The Variety iPhone App is available now at the iPhone App Store, and the Variety Widget – a web-based window that can be embedded in any website – is available now on Variety.com. Anyone can grab the widget and incorporate it into a web page, including Facebook, iGoogle and MyYahoo. In addition to the speed of content delivery, the new services allow users to select only the content they are interested in, whether that’s news, reviews, videos, photos or interactive tools.

“The media landscape is changing, and publishers are looking for creative ways to increase revenues while holding the line on costs,” said Walker Fenton, general manager of NewsGator’s media and consumer division. “Viral content syndication meets this need head on and, in the case of the Variety Widget and iPhone App, rides the world’s relentless interest in movies and entertainment.”

NewsGator servers drive content quickly and continuously to the iPhone App and Widget. The NewsGator Editor’s Desk application provides control and customization directly to the media source, allowing Variety to edit its content feeds on the fly.

Content is generated through Zibb, the business-to-business search engine of Reed Business, which is the premier provider of business information to the world. Zibb generates content from across the entire Reed Business portfolio plus selected business-to-business Web sites. By filtering and organizing a combination of Web, blog, directory and B2B content, Zibb always provides the best results for business users.

About Variety
Variety is the premier source of entertainment news, recognized and respected throughout the world of show business since 1905. The Variety Group – Daily Variety, Daily Variety Gotham, Weekly Variety, Variety Japan, Variety.com, 411 Publishing, Video Business and Tradeshow Week – are all owned by Reed Business Information (RBI), the largest business publisher in the U.S. RBI is a member of the Reed Elsevier Group plc (NYSE: RUK and ENL) – a world-leading publisher and information provider operating in the science and medical, legal and business-to-business industry sectors.

About Reed Business
A member of the Reed Elsevier plc group, Reed Business is the largest business-to-business publisher in the world. We have a portfolio of more than 200 market leading publications, newsletters, directories and reference books, electronic products, online services, industry conferences and awards, covering over 25 markets in the USA, UK, and Asia. Publishing many of the leading names in business publishing, including Variety, EDN, Computer Weekly, Design News, RCD, totaljobs.com, Estates Gazette, New Scientist, Flight International, Kellysearch, The Bankers' Almanac, Mardev and DM2, Reed Business has annual sales of over £2 billion. Our market leadership stems from a focus on product quality, innovation, editorial excellence, staff training and development, and the customer. This ensures that we continue to offer the most creative marketing and effective business solutions. For more information:
www.reedbusiness.com.

About NewsGator Technologies, Inc.
NewsGator Technologies helps enterprises and media companies leverage social computing solutions to deliver real business value. The company’s enterprise social networking and widget services are in use by hundreds of the world’s most recognized brands, including Biogen Idec, CBS, CNN, Discovery, National Geographic, Procter & Gamble and USA Today. NewsGator Social Sites and Enterprise Server give enterprises better ways to collaborate, share content, expand employee knowledge and improve productivity. NewsGator Widget Services enable media and brand companies to better engage their audiences and extend the value of their brands through viral syndication of content. NewsGator also offers free, award-winning RSS aggregators for the Web, desktop, mobile devices and e-mail clients. For more information, visit www.newsgator.com.

Contact Information

Abe Burns
Variety
323-617-9230
abe(dot)burns(at)variety.com www.variety.com

Laura Farrelly
NewsGator
303-552-2046
lauraf(at)newsgator(dot)com
www.newsgator.com

Ed Marshall
Beaupre
603-559-5816
emarshall(at)beaupre(dot)com
www.beaupre.com

Taking it to the streets...

2009-02-24T07:56:00.000-08:00

"The best laid plans of mice and men often go awry". That is really all I can say with regards to our promise to talk to you.

Like an uncomfortable silence at a party, starting the conversation back up can be awkward. So we'll just dive into new topics and pretend we never lost touch.

Taking it to the streets... Besides creating an enterprise-wide, centrally-developed and maintained approach to search (that reminds me that I should write a post about what we've accomplished of late just in the search space!) we have also begun delving into other centrally managed services being pushed out in a platform agnostic way.

Examples? Widgets! iPhone Apps! We're now working on taking the concepts of search, content aggregation and multichannel distribution out to a broader audience and additional destinations.

There is no denying that we're working from more places and more devices then ever before. There is no doubt that we're replacing our old habits of carrying around business magazines and visiting favorite publications homepage's several times a day with a more convenient all-about-me approach to information. We have personalized home pages (iGoogle, NetVibes,etc) , widget-based desktops, email and SMS alerts, RSS readers, social networks for our peers to spoon feed us important industry info and mobile phones where making a phone call seems like an after-thought feature compared to its internet and email capabilities...

This isn't new. You don't need (or likely want!) me to tell you all this, but it let's me be more dramatic in introducing some new efforts around here.

After lots of experimenting and evaluation we've decided that for us, delivery channels like this are part of our default feature set. We've also decided that reinventing them locally is not a good spend of intellect. The features we need have been developed by many partners and we consider most of them to be "commoditized". As much as 95% of the complexity of multichannel, multi-platform delivery with specialized reporting and whiz-bang behavior has already been put into libraries of code and fancy user-friendly (as opposed to developer-friendly) interfaces.

After a fun vendor evaluation we decided that we were going to work with NewsGator and their Social Widgets product to meet our own evolving widget creation and tracking needs. We're working at an enterprise level to create and roll out a business-centric focus to the features and opportunities made available in the new world of take-it-with me content and data. We'll be releasing many widgets with many of our publications over the next few months; some will be simple newsreaders or video players, where others will expose internal data assets in innovative ways.

Our first widget to be released into the wild is one for our flagship publication in the US B2B entertainment space -- Variety.com. Have a peek and let us know what you think:
http://www.variety.com/widget

As part of the same effort, we've worked with NewsGator to generate an iPhone version with similar functionality that is razzle-dazzled for the Apple-crew. That one can be seen here:
http://www.variety.com/iPhone

It is a free app, so if you are one of the lucky millions to have convinced your boss or your spouse that you should have one, check it out and let us know how we did.

We are going to continue to extend, expand, and enhance these widgets and the iPhone app in an iterative fashion and we'll be building many more. If you have something you'd like to see from us that you could take on the road or the desktop with you, please, let us know!

I'll also post the official press releases as we do these things, so that you can read it straight from the mouths of the marketeers as opposed to my rambling version of how the earth came to be...

@SES London 2009

2009-02-19T02:42:00.000-08:00

I've been at Search Engine Strategies in London this week. Over the next few days I'll aim to add a few posts talking about the key things I've either learnt, or found surprising from the sessions at the conference, but a few random impressions are:

It's a lot smaller this year than last - presumably as a result of the recession
There's quite a large proportion of Europeans, both attending and speaking - perhaps a sign that the media market in mainland Europe hasn't (yet) felt the pinch as much as the UK/US?
There's a surprising range of understanding expressed in some of the questions. It's easy to forget that there are still people out there for whom universal or blended search is a new, and confusing concept.
On the basis of some of the case studies, the publications at Reed Business are actually quite a long way ahead of the curve in terms of executing the basics for SEO, findability etc. Being close to the business it's easy to lose sight of that.
Twitter - everyone's using it, but I'm not sure how much value its added to the twitters experience of the conference - randomly quoting presentations you are in, in an attempt to appear insightful just adds random noise to the conversations. Or maybe I've just seen the first online phenomenon I'm too old for...

Product Development - IT and the Business

2008-06-20T13:27:00.000-07:00

I was talking to another publisher yesterday and it again struck me just how difficult it is, particularly for established publishers, to address the differences between IT and the Business.

We ended up discussing a presentation that we had from a group of Reed Business CIO's a number of years ago where the presentation was based on the thesis that CIO's were undervalued. This was taken from some Gartner research where they evaluated the relative perceived values of various board members, with the CIO/CTO coming only just about HR Directors at the bottom of the scale.

The entire discussion started out around how to change that perception and get the business to realise that IT in general and CTO's specifically add significant value. However, in thinking it through, we actually came to the conclusion that in publishing, if our business did not understand enough about web publishing to take control of web development, then we would have serious issues, as our products are now all IT based. The interesting and somewhat surprising conclusion was that if we got it right, the role of the CIO/CTO should diminish.

So that brings me back to one of my key beliefs, that technical teams should be fundamentally part of the business and led by business people who understand enough about IT to be able to drive the teams forward. The team needs to be fully involved in the product development and understand the business drivers from the beginning so that they can keep product development ahead of business requirements.

Too often, you see development teams that are interested in the purity of the code, the immediate task in hand or indeed see it as just a job. In effect, the business comes up with the requirements, and the developers just have to deliver on those without really understanding or contributing to the business objectives.

RBI and RB Search has made great progress in this area with Product Development teams using Agile methodology working across business and IT, but we still often split the functions apart.

RB Search and Zibb has an exceptionally passionate team which it is a privilege to be a part of, but the thing that truly makes teams such as this such high performers is their full involvement and commitment to the product/business. Empowering the team to take the lead, to innovate and test ideas has enabled RB Search to power over 130 websites while constantly evolving new products. This would be impossible if the concept of IT and the Business existed within RB Search. Every member adds value and can see the effect of their contribution on the site(s) and the business.

So, to come back to the start, publishing has moved a long way in the last 500 odd years since Caxton, but really did not move very far for the first 485 years, and even the following 10 years was not a significant shift, but now it is really starting to move with User Generated Content turning what used to be a one way street into a discussion. Innovations such as blogs, wikis, search and widgets are all changing the very dynamics of publishing. In order to succeed in this new world, we need to be innovative, agile and aggressive and we cannot see IT and the business as different, in media and publishing, they are one and the same.

B2B Opportunity Costs – the real challenge of Vertical Search

2008-06-18T14:48:00.000-07:00

It has taken me a great deal of time to think about what I should post as my first entry to this blog, not because I do not have anything interesting to say (hopefully!), but more because there is so much that we could cover. This is one of the most significant challenges with working in Search, and even more so when you include semantics in search, there is so much to talk about and so much to do.

For a relatively small team like RB Search, the opportunities are almost endless, so prioritisation, as with deciding what to write about in this initial blog becomes increasingly difficult.

At the recent Google Zeitgeist event, I was fascinated to hear when asked what was his biggest concern, Sergey Brin respond that it was Opportunity Cost. I doubt very much if that would be the main concern of the leaders of many of the global top 5000 companies, maybe it should, as then companies may be a little more innovative.

Obviously in a much smaller way, this does reflect the core challenges for RB Search, in that there is so much that you can do, it is the things that you don’t get to do that worry you most….what opportunity have we missed?

It is an old metaphor, but it is very much like being in the sweet shop, although in this case the sweet shop is the size of a supermarket and you are being challenged to do the supermarket sweep, but to do it strategically, picking the most valuable items as fast you can and getting to the registers before the business model evolves again…sometimes even evolving the business model yourselves, just to disrupt the other shoppers.

All of this makes search great fun, as well as extraordinarily challenging. You need a team that is entirely focused, but exceptionally adaptable as you quickly migrate models, content types, semantics and products.

The Opportunity Costs of search are massive, even if you are Google, as there is so much you cannot do even when you are delivering a huge array of new products. Just some of the things that you need to think about and that I intend to cover in greater detail in later posts are:

· Zibb On Demand – syndicating search services across a global enterprise
· Pushing Search – using search to push content
· Industries – which should you cover and what makes them special to the users
· Semantics – taxonomies, ontologies, folksonomies and how these can help users get to an answer
· Content Types – thinking about search in a different way
· UI – evolving away from simple results
· Tools – which tools and why
· Crawlers & Data – variants for different purposes
· Relevance model – making them relevant
· Coupling – or not….ensuring you loosely couple systems
· Widgets – the next revolution, driven by search
· Team – brilliant people driving innovation and some very strange conversations
· And more as it occurs to me!

Now that I have got off to a start and got through my Opportunity challenge around this blog, I can hopefully start to talk more about the different elements of search and B2B mentioned above that make the difference.

Breaking the silence... At last.

2008-06-12T09:46:00.000-07:00

So we've had this little Zibb experiment running for well over a year now and you haven't heard a word from us. In today's Web-2.0-it's-all-about-conversation-world, you have to ask "What were we thinking???" Well, to be honest, we were a little busy and kept putting the conversation off. Now after all this time, the impact of talking about the goals could be a bit like the sound of a tree falling in the forest when no one is there to hear it; but we'll bash on regardless.

Over the coming months we'll try to make up for the silent treatment we've given everyone by talking about Zibb.com, B2B and vertical search, taxonomies, ontologies, tagging, user interfaces, spam, entity recognition, advertising, and search in general. We'll share feedback users have given us, point out interesting developments in the search and publishing industries, and we'll offer unsolicited opinions. We won't tackle it with any structure and we won't constrain ourselves to any particular topics. Oh, and hopefully we won't just talk about ourselves.

We're going to let different team members contribute, we're going to be as open, honest and transparent as possible, and we're committed to the conversation. We don't take ourselves too seriously so please speak freely. We do take our business and our users seriously, so again, please speak VERY freely. Use the comments section on this blog as well as our feedback forms to ask any questions about the site, the team, the ideas, etc and we'll do our best to come clean.

Now we'll all go off to debate whether this is indeed the worst-first post EVER on any blog. I am sure to take a few hits from the team on this one...