Politics took center stage in U.S. news this week, thanks to mid-term elections. As expected, there was plenty of coverage in the mainstream media as well as blogs. Because bloggers commonly comment on news stories that they find interesting, a few sites that analyze blog content have become great resources for finding news about a given topic. My favorite free aggregator is currently Techmeme, which does a great job of surfacing the most-discussed technology stories online.

At Biz360, we monitor tens of millions of blogs—which gives us tons of data to mine. Because we also track thousands of mainstream media web sites, we’re able to track links between blogs and the media. In November so far, we’ve tracked 764,000 links from blogs to mainstream media web sites (and hundreds of thousands going the other direction as well). Analyzing the links enables us to surface some interesting nuggets, like this list of the most-linked news stories since November 1:

So why no articles on Democrats retaking Congress or Rumsfeld’s resignation? Even though these were two of the top topics in the news, they didn’t generate a definitive article that was linked to heavily by other writers. Because some of the stories developed over the course of multiple days, linking was diffused across different articles from many different sources.

The articles that did make this list span a number of different topics, but most of them share these common traits:

• Interestingness (a term coined by Flickr): the kinds of stories that spawn reactions and discussions.
• Authority: Many of the most-linked stories are based on exclusive reports or news scoops from trusted organizations. Half of the top 10 stories were from CNN, the third most-linked source after The New York Times and Washington Post.

Taken as a whole, online link analysis can be a valuable component of corporate early warning systems in market intelligence solutions like Market360. It’s important to know not only what’s being said, but also how far it’s being spread.

We held our 3rd Engineering Hack Day here yesterday and, as usual, I can’t wait for the demonstration session this afternoon. For us, hack days are opportunities for all developers to suspend their normal work and devote time to projects of their choice that:

1. Are relevant to Biz360
2. Can be prototyped in 24 hours
3. Would be fun to implement

Biz360 has a long history of innovation, and many of our key product features were initiated through these kinds of prototypes. So, after reading about the experiences of two other Silicon Valley companies, we decided to formalize our own hack days.

In prior hack day events, our engineers have come up with Ajax-based enhancements for richer user experiences in Market360, search/discovery mashups for ad hoc analysis, real-time system monitoring visualizations, and several other interesting projects. Several of these developments were selected for further refinement, and are now in the hands of our customers.

I was fortunate to be able to attend Yahoo’s open hack day a week and a half ago, which was also a great experience. The basic idea is the same—developers building and demonstrating working prototypes in 24 hours—but on a completely different scale. At Biz360, we listen to iTunes; at Yahoo, they brought in Beck. At Biz360, we pick up a few sandwiches; at Yahoo, they brought in hundreds of pizzas and Krispy Kremes. At Biz360, the best hack earns a gold-painted hacksaw; at Yahoo, they gave away a 32″ LCD TV.

So far, there has been no shortage of hack day project ideas, because our technology involves text analysis, real-time reporting, grid computing, and content acquisition … with scalability requirements throughout. In fact, I believe that the fact that we offer so many interesting technical challenges is one of the major reasons why we’re able to recruit and retain top-notch engineering talent here at Biz360.

The Forrester Brand Monitoring Wave that we mentioned last month was published today and is now available for purchase. The Biz360 summary is available here. It’s the deepest dive into our space to date, and we’re hopeful that the increased attention will benefit the industry as a whole, especially those of us who were selected for the review.

Overall, analyst Peter Kim rated Biz360 as a “Strong Performer.” From the executive summary:

The vendor offers a strong, end-user-focused brand monitoring solution with good coverage of data sources. The company’s Market360 product features a powerful and flexible user interface with broad reporting capabilities. Biz360’s presence in analytic and consulting services is small but growing, making the solution a better fit for companies that seek a self-service tool.

The report includes more detail regarding our flagship product, Market360:

Biz360’s user interface provided the most in-depth functionality for client-side use. The ability to construct queries, reports, and alerts, as well as tuning and filtering sources and speaker sentiment, are provided in a user-friendly Ajax-based interface. However, empowerment comes with a downside: Some clients report that the system’s complexity makes it easy to miss some of the functions that are available for use.

The complexity criticism is fair, and one that we’ve heard from some of our users in the past. In an effort to help our clients to realize as much value as possible from the application, we just conducted an extensive round of customer feedback interviews. Based on this feedback, further usability enhancements are in the works. Here’s what we currently do to help users on this front:

• Build customizable dashboards that can incorporate all of the reports our customers need on a single home page.
• Offer alternate delivery options, including periodic email, email alerts, offline reports, and RSS.
• Provide personal assistance through our account services and technical services teams.

The Forrester report also evaluated our services capabilities:

The vendor offers training opportunities on par with other vendors. Biz360 is building consulting services capabilities, but these services are still nascent.

On this point, we respectfully disagree. Our consulting services team is small, true, but it consistently generates very high rates of satisfaction and loyalty among our current customers. Our services strategy involves not only building a top-notch internal staff, but also partnering with external consultants for targeted strategic engagements. Combining the power of our application with the insight of expert media analysts has led to some of our most compellling client success stories.

A couple of our competitors secured higher overall ratings in the study. Congratulations to Cymfony’s Jim Nail and Nielsen BuzzMetrics’ Pete Blackshaw, both of whom are recognized as industry thought leaders. We can thank them for leading effective marketing campaigns which have increased awareness for this space. With our own brand and thought initiatives like MarketIQ and key executive positions filled, we plan to be in the leader category when the next brand monitoring wave rolls around in 12-18 months.