Bloggers can help their readers by providing links to relevant and timely content. Knowing that a particular blogger will always provide more to discover than just the blog post builds that blogger’s brand in the eyes of the readers. Now there is a personal assistant for bloggers that helps with this process by automatically surfacing content that is relevant to the blog’s topic.
This isn’t just links to search results from the web at large. This is newly published ways that the reader can go further such as purchase, job, or learning opportunities. Each surfaced opportunity isn’t just a link to a web page. Readers get to follow this opportunity on social networks or discuss the topic with a personal assistant in order to learn more.
Big Data is a recent trend where companies analyze large streams of data for a better understanding of how to position their products and services. Open source technologies such as Hadoop and R drive down the costs of Big Data thus placing that technology within reach of start ups and SMB.
Niche projects like the Opportunity Eye for Bloggers give individual bloggers the benefits of Big Data too. Without any advanced knowledge, bloggers can review who followed, discussed, or visited relevant opportunities on which of their blog topics. Popular opportunities become blogging material for future posts. Let your reader’s interests drive what you will blog about next for a more relevant blog.
Opportunity Eye is an initiative that focuses on a new class of applications known as personal assistant software. Our first project is a personal assistant for bloggers.
In this silent video demo, you will see this opportunity eye surfaced as a Drupal plugin. The video zooms in on just the widget itself without showing the rest of the page which includes the blog. You are presented with a short list of titles that categorise each opportunity. New categories replace old ones periodically for as long as you stay on the page. These opportunities are kept in a repository that the personal assistant software is constantly updating based on its own never ending, ongoing search for new opportunities from various social networks, resource catalogues, and marketplaces.
When you hover the mouse over a category, a card appears giving the user more detail about the opportunity and presenting the user with some choices. You can either follow that opportunity on the relevant social network, discuss the opportunity some more with the opportunity eye, or visit the associated web page where the opportunity was discovered.
When discussing the opportunity, you are asked why this opportunity is significant. Based on the your answer, the opportunity eye will present a series of similar opportunities and open a new browser window once the you accept one of them.
All user activity is silently tracked, recorded, and available to the blogger in the form of an interactive spreadsheet. The blogger can pivot through the statistics of how many people followed, discussed, or visited various opportunities based on time, opportunity category, or area of the site. With this tool, the blogger can discover new, similar topics of interest to the readers that can be blogged about in the future.
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