Blogs and Bloggers

I managed to get a mention in the Top 100 Analyst Blogs published by Technobabble. They very generously make the point that Holway’s HotViews would have been ranked higher if the latest stats had been used. And some! – we tripled our readership in the first six weeks of 2008.

I’ve reported on the increasing importance of blogs/bloggers before. If you are a vendor, ignore them at your peril! It is interesting to note that most of the news flow about the Microsoft/Yahoo/News Corp/AOL saga is now driven by bloggers. They are the ones who break the stories that you then read day-by-day on the newswires and newspapers.

So what really interests me is how the ‘old-established’ analyst firms have adapted (or not) to blogs. I’d like to think that I was the one responsible for getting Ovum into the “daily news drug addiction” business with Hotnews and EuroView. (Actually I don’t just ‘think’ I was, I was!) But, now I've left, I increasingly wonder if their heart is still in it! Forrester ‘gets it’ but IDC, PAC and Gartner (for example) haven’t established any regular dialogue with their customers or potential market. They risk losing both their influence, and ultimately their customers, if they don’t ‘wake up’ to the challenge.