As mentioned last week, I spent a good part of Thursday with a couple of local companies, just learning about who they are and what they do. Umbria, up the road a bit in Boulder, was the first one I sat down with. Although I’d scheduled the meeting after they were brought to my attention because I believed that their ability to monitor community behavior was likely to be of interest, it turns out that they’re able to provide considerably more sophisticated results than I anticipated.
The basic premise is this: blogs and forums, as have been discussed many times in this space and others, are veritable gold mines of information. Representing as they do the collective thought processes, reactions, frustrations, and experiences of the communities behind them, blogs, forums and to some extent wikis as well have assumed a role of crucial importance in monitoring projects or products.
To date, however, monitoring these communities meant a considerable investment of time, because mining these resources was no easier than getting gold out of the ground. The variable value of different pieces of content, the volume at which they are generated, and their unstructured nature all work against big picture, detailed macro type observations.
That’s where Umbria comes in; by crawling the various content sources and distilling them down algorithmically, Umbria’s able to provide an interesting spread of metrics involving community participation and behaviors. It distills blogs and forums into a set of BI dashboard-style graphs that can reveal spikes in activity, trends of positive or negative comments, and basic community demographics (determined, apparently, through complex examination of language patterns and usage) – among other things.
While I haven’t had the opportunity to study the results in enough detail as yet to render a verdict on how accurate their surveys are, I did get enough of a look at a report on open source – including views of the Apache, Linux and Tomcat communities – to know that there’s definitely something there. The folks from Umbria have promised to get me some samples, so I’ll go into more detail when I get those, but for now I’d definitely recommend that businesses looking for quantitative metrics to validate and verify their qualitative views of commmunities give these guys a call. Cool stuff, and not just because they’re based here in CO 😉
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