Mitch Ratcliffe is the founder of a small company named Persuadio. Persuadio was recently featured in Esther Dyson’s PC Forum - one of hottest annual events in the technology and venture capital worlds. Why? Because Mitch is an entrepreneur with an innovative piece of software. His company has created a free blog social relationship exploration tool called MyDensity. MyDensity maps the first two degrees of the social network around any URL. People can use it to figure out where they are and how people find them. The basic idea is to increase understanding of how people’s sites are rising and falling in popularity and where those changes start in the market.

What we hope to let you do with our tool is let you see where [on the Web] you are compared to all of these other kinds of interests and then measure how much value is somewhere and who you need to influence in order to get people to start paying attention to you.

I found out about MyDensity thru stories Mitch is posting about his ongoing entrepreneurial experiences. See his Red Herring posts entitled We’re talking real money now (Mar. 9/05), Crunch Time (Mar. 17/05), and The extraordinary lightness of entrepreneuring (Mar. 23/05).

Also check out RatcliffeBlog, his personal blog, where he announces Persuadio LLC.

Why I blog this? Because I think he is on to something.

We need more ways to visualize the heaps of metadata the Blogosphere produces. The picture below (created about 24 hours ago) shows the results of a search for this blog. This is a young blog so I did not expect any results, but I had a few.

Searching with MyDensity returns a graph that you can dig into. Needless to say I am impressed with the application. The visual interface and navigation need work but can be upgraded later - innovative functionality comes first. When the resources are available a better visual interface can be built and MyDensity could be set to kick ass. But hey… maybe I am biased?

Why I really blog this? As you may have guessed, the primary reason for this post is to attract Mitch’s attention. I would hazard a small bet that he notices. Maybe this post will help increase Echo Generations popularity. I guess I will just have to check in from time to time using MyDensity to see if it does.

If he notices this post I wager mucho dinero that the next time I use his search engine the results for this blog will be worth posting about… again. :)

via ZDNet - Startup Persuadio visualizes opportunity in the Internet’s long tail. ZDNet also hosts an audio interview with Ratcliffe (mp3).