What's Bnet?

By dpnickdpnick (1223916941|%a, %b %e at %I:%M%p)

One of the websites from today's class about the Deep Web was BNet. Our professor talked briefly about it, mentioning that he was relatively knew to the site, but so far he has been impressed. I decided to take a look around the site and review it for you, so enjoy!

A sample article

The first thing I thought when I loaded the website was "Wow!" The front page is beautifully organized and certainly aesthetically pleasing. The slideshow of articles in the middle of the screen all issued interesting articles: one about Pfizer, another about outsourcing, and one about managing during a recession. The latter article sounded the most interesting, and so I decided to check it out. The organization of this article was amazing! Each point the writer made was seperated by sticky notes at the top, and within each point was organized excellent as well. Reading this article was extremely interesting and easy to follow. To make it even better, there were highlights at the top of the article. Embedded in the article was a "Hot Tip", a "Big Idea", and a "Case Study", all of which provide a nice break throughout the read. I thought the case study was the best idea, because many times when I read business articles I am curious how the subject ties into the big picture of the world. Even if all the articles aren't organized this well, it is still great to know that the website has this potential. I also noticed on the side of the article was a section called "Top Rated" which listed all of the top rated articles. This could be very helpful if you are searching for a good read. As well, there was another side section called "Recommended Business Articles" that offered even more interesting articles.

logo_bnet_88x107.gif

Industries

It became obvious to me that this site has major potential, and so I investigated further. Going back to the homepage, I looked through the tabs at the top: Today, Management, Strategy, Work Life, Insight, Industries, Business Library, and Videos. Clicking each of these yields a page dedicated to that specific topic, but unfortunately I don't have time to review each one. One really cool feature is that on each of these pages, there is a "Top Rated" section that showed the top articles for the given topic. This is really nice because if you don't feel like randomly searching through the site you can look here for the most popular articles under the topic you're interested in. I decided to pick one, choosing the Industries tab.

And again: Damn! They have main pages for each major industry, so you can look at whatever interests you the most. I decided to look at the Technology industry to see what's going on there (since it's most relevant for this class). For each article, there are tags for all applicable resources. And it just so happens when I scrolled down a bit there was an article about iTunes, with the tag Apple Inc.! (my term project). I clicked it and was instantly ecstatic. This page has everything about Apple! Listed at the top are the stock price (with a button that takes you to a detailed quote of the stock), on the side I see information regarding the company's information and links to the key competitors, and finally articles about the news and analysis of the company. There are 35 articles about Apple from the past week! Are you kidding? You can sort the articles by relevance, date, and popularity to fit whatever you want. Organizing by popularity is marvelous, and I fell in love with all of the articles at the top. You can organize the articles as well by what type of content they are (Blogs, Links, Research articles, Image, Video, and News Items just to name a few). And yet, there's still more! You can organize the articles as well by Tag. Some examples include: Apple Macintosh, iTunes, iPod, stock, iPhone, and more. This is extremely helpful if you are looking to specialize your search further. Overall, there are a total of 223 pages (with 20 articles on each page) of Apple articles (= 4,460 articles). Yeah, you can bet I subscribed to this RSS feed!

Search

At this point, I didn't even need to see anymore of this site to be satisfied, but I was curious what else the site offered. Given we looked at this page in class for it's search abilities, I gave this a shot. Along with most Americans, I have been following the financial crisis to understand what is going on with America's economy (especially given that my future lies in Finance). I therefore decided to search for information about the recent $700 billion bailout plan that has been dominating the news. On the homepage, I searched for "bailout plan" under articles. Looking through the results, I am very pleased. They are all extremely relevant, exactly the kind of news I was searching for. The search feature also allows you to search the entire site, Library, Stocks, and the Dictionary. I tested each of these out and each worked sensationally. Searching GOOG (the symbol for Google) instantly brought up the stock page for GOOG, with all of the information provided by a typical stock quote page. Also, on this page there's links to the company page for Google and all kinds of articles regarding news and investing with Google. I tried the Dictionary feature by searching for security. This is a term I have been hearing very frequently in Finance class, and I was curious as to the true definition. It brought back very good business definitions and "Wiktionary definitions".

Video

I was afraid of making my blog too long, however, I felt that I had to talk atleast briefly about the Video feature. From any page, you can click the Video tab at the top. There are videos for every business area. This feature could be extremely helpful for anyone in business, whether a student or a professional. I clicked the News & Finance section, and viewed a video about the Bailout package. It was very good! While not too long, it efficiently discussed the bailout package while doing so in an entertaining fashion. And of course the most popular videos and recently added videos are listed at the bottom.

Final Review

This site has a ton to offer in all areas of business, and could be extremely useful for a business student (such as yourself). Be sure to give it a shot next time you are doing anything business related online. I have already added this site to my bookmark bar on my browser, and I can see myself reading this site every day. I extol BNET!

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