Initially planned as a small add-on to the BARC ecosystem maps, the “Blog Portfolio” has been grown to a very popular part of the ecosystem maps for Power BI, Azure Analytics and Qlik.

As we often are asked for many details about the concept and how the positions are calculated we want to give you a bit of background of the concept in this article.

First and most important – The idea behind the Blog Portfolio is to inspire people to browse for great content in the ecosystem and get in touch with the people creating that content. The axes and visualizations on the portfolio shall help to find the right channels for their needs and interest and DO NOT RATE the blogs. 

We especially recommend to look into the niches: Smaller blogs are often focused on special topics, or specialize in more detailed articles. That’s why we started to add specializations in the portfolio and add recommendations to our “what’s new articles”.

What is required to appear in the Blog Portfolio?

First and most important, get in touch: Write to maps@bi-survey.com or answer to one of the posts on Linkedin (see Stefan Sexl’s Linkedin profile). We’ll the check the offering and will add it in one of the regular updated (usually at least once a quarter).

The only criteria is a minimum of 5 content items in the last 12 months about the specific topic with general value to the community. As an example, we add corporate blogs if they meet that criteria and blog about topics of general interest, not if they blog about their offering only.

For blogs with many long-lasting items like e.g. great training material we sometimes make an exception and add them even if the items are older, but still of great value for the community.

What are the elements of the Blog Portfolio and how are they calculated?

• The x-axis shows the orientation of the blogs towards the more technical user looking for expert content (right side) versus the more business-oriented blogs on the left side. The positions are defined by the ecosystems team at BARC – and pure subjective analyst opinion. If a blogger thinks he should be positioned differently, we reevaluate the position.
• The y-axis is showing the popularity. For YouTube channels the main KPI is number of subscribers, for the few channels that do not show that number we estimate it based on the number of views of the videos in it. For “classic” blog sites we use a tool (https://ahrefs.com/de/backlink-checker) to measure the domain rating and the backlinks, combining this two KPIs with a formula – for sites that are integrated in bigger blogging platforms like medium.com we rely on the backlinks, for corporate sites we estimate the importance of the blog offering. At the end, a formula combines YouTube and classic popularity, for combined offerings we use the bigger number. Sounds complicated, but the feedback of the community shows that it produces quite realistic results. And yes, it is not exact science 😉
• The bubble size is defined by the number of updates in the last 12 months – we count all articles that are relevant for the specific portfolio, so a blog site about multiple BI ecosystems can appear in different sizes in multiple portfolios. As an example, there are a couple of blogs in the Microsoft ecosystems that write about general Azure Analytics topics as well as Power BI specific topics.

Additional elements

• The languages are shown with different bubble colors or flags. As the main languages of the BARC team are English and German, we are happy about the help of the community especially for other languages
• The specializations are different for each ecosystem – the concept is evolving right now and adds additional information for topics like e.g. reporting for each blog

Note to the content providers

We reevaluate all blogs on a regular basis, but not for each single update. So if you think the position of your blog should change or you doubled the number of subscribers in the last 3 months, feel free to send us a short e-Mail and we have a look. Generally, we are happy to stay in touch with you!