Popular Topics Outnumber BitPipe Contributors

It's 705 to 181 for white papers less than a year old

Of all the high-tech companies that have published white papers since October 2005, I counted 181 that have posted white papers to BitPipe in the 705 topics the site lists as most popular. BitPipe is the aggregator of IT thought leadership owned by TechTarget. It describes itself as "the Web's leading online information source for IT professionals who need technology white papers ...."

You can find these companies and topics under "Market Intelligence" on the BitPipe sitemap. I have listed them in a single table on my own website.

The table was compiled the second week of October by inspecting the titles and authors appearing in each of the 705 topics. The information is freely available to anyone looking at the BitPipe website.

Compared to the universe of IT firms, 181 is a small number. In fact, it is only about one-quarter the size of the number of "most popular" topics (a subset of all BitPipe topics). Nor does this fraction reflect the lopsided contribution of a handful of companies whose papers appear over and over again under multiple topics and sub-topics. If you took out the top 10 companies (in terms of number of white paper listings) you would reduce the number of companies by less than 6%. But you would reduce the number of recent white paper listings by over two-thirds.

It's not just the names of companies that repeat; many of the same titles repeat under different subtopics, and many of the same subtopics repeat under several different topics. The result is a "perceptual multiplier effect" that makes 181 feel big. Compounding the effect is the high degree of granularity in the choice of topics and subtopics -- many of which BitPipe differentiates by merely adding qualifiers like "system," "software," and "service" to the same root.

This maze makes white papers hard to find -- which may help explain why more companies are not represented. You don't know what all the choices are until you drill down into all potentially relevant silos and when you do drill down in one it's easy to forget what choices you had in others. At least as an alternative, why not provide a simple list of all companies and all topics? Also, why not allow for compound searches by right clicking on multiple companies and topics in drop down menus? Finally, why not make topics less granular? Serious researchers will still look at both "system" and "software" versions of a topic anyway just to make sure they have covered all the bases. Why put users through all that work?

One other observation: when BitPipe says that there are no documents in a topic, there usually are documents -- which you will miss if you do not click on the topic anyway.

No doubt more companies would write white papers if they felt they could get more of an audience -- and a return on their investment. Making white papers easier to find would help.