Word of Mouth is the Key to Success with ReferralKey

ReferralKey has been described as LinkedIn mixed with AngiesList. That's not a bad way to put it because they do allow you to build a network of professional contacts as on LinkedIn and they build lists of reputable businesses as Angieslist does with reliable contractors. 

This service focuses on a simple premise: You scratch my back and I'll scratch your's. So, you just build your network of contacts and refer the best you know and hopefully they'll do likewise and everyone benefits from the exchange. ReferralKey does all of the dirty work and helps you track every transaction and analyzes everything for you too.

You can advertise your business on ReferralKey and get listed by your location and industry. They will also register your listing with many search engines. This all enhances the odds of consumers finding your listing. 

Membership to ReferralKey isn't free, even though they do let you create an account for free and allow you to receive up to three referrals without incurring any charges. Once you've reached three referrals you'll have to decide on which membership plan you want. There's a Silver Key plan for $10 a month and a Gold Key plan for $20 a month. The differences are detailed on here.

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The concept of this service is solid and if referrals can generate significant amounts of revenue then it makes sense to sign up for one of ReferralKey's membership plans. The site is easy to use and they provide a great deal of useful information regarding your contacts and your industry. The old adage is true: It's not what you know, but who you know that counts. In this case, it could pay off big time as well.

Iterend vs. Technorati vs. Google Blog Search

Iterend is a new blog search engine (still in private beta) that hopes to steal Technorati's lunch money, but first they have to beat Google's Blog Search to the punch. In this showdown, we'll perform a search test on all three services and compare the results. Checkout the screencast as well.

Technorati has been king of the hill for a long time when it comes to blog search but as happens with all monarchies, they've grown complacent and stopped innovating which has opened the door for other potential heirs to the throne.Enter iterend and Google Blog Search which recently hit the streets. The initial reviews of Google's foray into the blog search arena has been mostly positive.

Before checking the results of the showdown, here's a little bit about iterend which presents a busy home page with a flood of recent phrases as tags along with the top stories in the past twenty four hours. At the top of the page is their search bar which you can adjust to search for a different time frame such as the last hour, last week, anytime, etc. Here are some other features of note.

- All articles are linked to structured wikipedia information, which makes it possible to search by categories.

- Search results are clustered and you can search on sentence level, post level or blog level.

- Next to the search results, relevant phrases and categories are displayed, so you are able to restrict your search or get an overview over the information you are looking for.

- You can search for related posts to a given topic, url or cluster

The Test Results

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As you'll see in the screencast, the old dog Technorati still seemed to provide the best and fastest results when searching for the same exact keywords. We used a post from Mashable for this video just to show how different the search results were for all three search engines. In most cases, Technorati provided the most recent blog posts.

While Google's Blog Search impressed with its sheer extensiveness, Technorati seemed to include far less unseemly characters in its search results. Both Google Blog Search and Iterend appeared to include far more spammers, sploggers and other things you usually find hiding under a rock. Over all, Technorati is still the top dog for blog search while Google's Blog Search and Iterend are worthy challengers that will surely improve with time.

Xignite at Web 2.0 NYC

Among the hundreds of companies and social platforms debuting at Web 2.0 Expo NY was Xignite, a new financial Web service. Xignite's platform lets financial sites show global delayed stock data in their applications and satisfies the growing demand for reliable stock quotes from emerging countries.

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Xignite uses an on-demand model to serve clients like ING, Goodyear, and McDonald's and provide market quotes, news, corporate data, industry information, analytics, tools and more. Until recently, much of the data that Xignite collects and organizes was otherwise scattered, raw or only available in bulk form. With their services, Xignite is leading the way for service-oriented business applications.

I had the opportunity to meet with Stephane Dubois, the CEO and Founder of Xignite, and discuss Xignite's goals, special features and Splice, their new platform for creating web services mashups. (And, I don't need to remind you how excited I get about mashups). Using the Splice visual designer, developers can create a mashup in just 60 seconds by dragging and dropping objects without ever having to write code.

A special thanks to Sony for letting me use their amazing TG1 HD camcorder, without which none of the Web 2.0 Expo videos would have been possible. You can watch the video via the embed below or download the MP4 directly.