The Techdirt Insight Community Is Off To A Great Start

from the thanks! dept

On Wednesday we announced our new offering, the Techdirt Insight Community, which is currently in beta testing. The response has been phenomenal -- beyond even what we had hoped for. A ton of people have pre-registered as potential bloggers for the community, and we're beginning the process of reviewing them. What blew us away, honestly, was the incredibly high quality of many of the bloggers and the content that they write. If you'd also like to pre-register to join the community, please fill out the registration form here. We're very focused on our initial beta customers right now, so, we're prioritizing bloggers who have expertise and insight in certain specific areas, but we will be contacting all of you as we get closer to launch. On the customer side, we also received many great inquiries, and will be following up with all of you shortly. If you are interested in tapping the knowledge of a bunch of incredibly insightful bloggers, please contact us here.

I should say that the Office 2.0 conference turned out to be a great event at which to announce our plans. We met a ton of great people, who not only were interested in joining the community or tapping its knowledge, but also had a number of great discussions with people who had ideas for future plans for the service as well. It was also interesting to see many of the companies presenting -- of which I will write more about sometime next week.

We also got some great coverage and responses to the announcement:

• Rob Hof at Business Week: "Essentially, Techdirt's trying to turn groups of bloggers into ad-hoc analyst firms, filling what Masnick sees as a void between broad consumer testing firms and traditional analyst firms such as Gartner and Forrester."
• Jeff Nolan at Venturebeat: "The service that [Techdirt] launched this week is revolutionary, it's called the Techdirt Insight Community and it grew out of their own insights into where corporate intelligence (an oxymoron, I know now) and more importantly, discussions they had with their clients, including myself, about what we needed.... Corporate clients are screaming for this kind of service not because traditional analysts are failing them, but rather because the information marketplace has become increasingly complex and in order to attract and impress smaller influencer communities you really have to engage the people who are in them."
• Michael Calore at Wired: "Bloggers are an opinionated bunch, so it's no surprise to see a natural progression towards business models that leverage bloggers' informed opinions and allow them to make money off of simply saying what they think."
• Kevin Maney at USA Today wants to know if the bloggers in the system will be called blogsultants or consulgers? (Answer: hopefully neither...)
• Matt Marshall at Venturebeat gave a little background on us and explained how the new service works.
• Rick Klau: "The people at Techdirt have always been good at weeding out the important stuff (that’s what makes their Corporate Intelligence service valuable, and their blog so good) — so identifying influential bloggers on key topics won't be hard at all. Bloggers — never a group known for a dearth of opinions — get to trade on Techdirt's name and access to corporate clients. The end result will be fast, informed opinion that will be quite useful to the companies who hire Techdirt."
• Mark Fletcher: "The idea is to create a marketplace and enabling technology for companies to consult with bloggers. I think it's a great idea that has the potential to disrupt several markets."
• Rob Hyndman who kindly calls it "Yet another impressive development at Techdirt."

Thanks to all those and everyone else who's written about us or contacted us. We've been thrilled with the response so far, and are hard at work to make the Techdirt Insight Community a huge success.