Montreal Tech Watch

Seeing how Carl Mercier and Mat Balez managed to get on techcrunch and on the frontpage of digg last week, I was curious to see how other startups were doing on blogs.

The following map shows Montréal startups and new websites; with the size showing the total number of trackbacks they had for the last 6 months from the blogosphere, and the color showing the pace at which they are receiving new mentions on blogs, blue being 0 mentions per week and red being 200 mentions per week.

click on the image to get the large version

The data is taken straight from technorati. Furthermore, I distributed each of them according to their target market (if they were targeting the consumer or the entreprise market) and on the other axis, the interactivity and empowerement given to each user, from a list of criterias.

First, one comment: podbean and watchmojo‘s size stands out from the graph, but I believe it’s mostly because they have gamed technorati in the past, by producing multiple rss feeds and by automatic generation of links on subdomains which are obviously engineered for Google and search engines like technorati. However, it’s fair to mention that podbean users (podcasters) are also promoting the service by themselves.

That said, one conclusion that I get from this graph is that websites that focus on interactivity/user empowerment do very well on blogs. refactormycode.com, defensio, librivox are getting a lot of traction, and for me, it’s because the users of these services have a very strong feeling of ownership towards the content on each website.

The subject of marketing and promoting services on the web has been for a long time a mystery to me, on how a web destination could suddenly become viral popular and have users promote the services themselves instead of the marketing department pushing it. Seeing this graph, the picture is clearer. The lesson is that it pays to make the user empowered, and second, it pays to be have a strategy for digg and techcrunch.

If you have comments about how to leverage other tools like del.icio.us, stumbleupon, emails, you are more than welcome

Note: i just had an email asking how i put akoha, praized or standoutjobs even though their features are not public yet: they were just put in the middle of the graph