Next Generation of TalkDigger Demos Available

Talkdigger could evolve to Talk “Finder” and Talk “Joiner”
I’ve been a big user of Talkdigger, recommended it at conferences and to friends. Talkdigger is an “Index Aggregator” it pulls data from all the major blog indexers like technorati, googleblog, bloglines, feedster, msnsearch, google, yahoo, dig.

I’ve found a few users for it outside of blogs, it can find out who’s talking about your ‘public’ website, or even who’s linking to your flickr photos (I showed this trick to Thomas Hawk at Bloggercon) This is a must use product for those who are watching a companies online reputation (What I call blog angels).
Here’s how they describe themselves

“Talk Digger is a new way to find, follow and join discussions evolving on the Web. So you have three elements:

(1) finding discussions, (2) following discussions and (3) joining discussions.

With the current version of Talk Digger, users get stuck at step one. These new improvements to Talk Digger will let its users to go ahead with the step two and three.

With these new features, Talk Digger will become a social platform that helps people to connect with other people that follow the same stories (the premise here is that people that follow the same discussions will also have some personal and professional interests in common). It will also become a search engine of its own, and not only a meta-one.“

The founder Frederick Giasson (his product blog) has provided some demos of the upcoming features, this comes across as a next generation vertical search engine as well as creating features that resemble social sites for bloggers.

Demos of next generation:

• The Talk Digger home page.
• A Talk Digger conversation page. This is the core section of the system.
• A user profile page.
• A user page.
• A user tracking page.
• The Talk Digger search engine.

There’s a sign up for the ‘alpha release’ for anyone that wants to demo the next generation

Recommendations (you leave your own below)

• Interesting concept to build a social site as an ‘overlay’ over existing bloggers
• Talk Digger still needs to have search queries embedded in the HTML address.
• Time to update the look and feel –perhaps consider hiring a web designer (here’s some resources on Design 2.0).
• Consider hiring a Marketer to help with Copy, oversee design, and blogger relations.
• Empower embedded plugins bloggers can put into their blog and display results.
• Map mashup is cool –why not partner with frappr?
• Another user profile page? ack, the world can’t take another place to put our data –make sure we can link to our ‘about’ pages on our blogs
• Consider tying this into techmeme.com, tailrank, and other meme trackers –there’s some relevancy.
• Make sure you’ve ability to export some of these, maybe RSS, or back to my suggestion about the HTML query. I know developers will want to tie into this –make it ‘open’.
• Keep up this hobby/passion Fred!

Human side of Fred
Although I’ve never met Frederick, he’s shared with me that he’s a web developer living in Quebec. He’s travels a lot and has some pictures of his journeys to Nepal (He must have found his inner self balance karma one with the blogosphere ideals way up here) He’s got other pictures here. (Being a photo geek, I find this type of online sharing cool)

Note: Non paid review
Web is my passion. I’m not being paid to do this –this is an honest and open review by Web Strategist, Jeremiah Owyang. If I find it interesting I’ll give it an honest review –good or bad.
Edit:Thomas Hawk finds Talkdigger intersting too!

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 6th, 2006 at 6:15 pm and is filed under Feedback, Search Strategy, Social Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.