March 2009

BlogPulse & Technorati

What's hot news in the blogosphere? Get a clue by using BlogPulse. This site is provided by Neilsen, a company selling consumer and brand monitoring tools. But BlogPulse is free. You may already be familiar with Technorati, another free source for tracking what's happening in the blogosphere. Technorati "looks at linking and attention patterns of posts, who wrote them, who's linking to them, the rate of their popularity growth and many other factors.... to determine what’s hot now and what’s gaining in attention — effectively the pulse of the blogopshere." Technorati also tracks top news stories from the media, so on the Technorati home page, you can find "Rising blog posts by attention" and "Rising news stories by attention," search the blogosphere, or examine Blogger Central for rising links and top tags of the day.

In BlogPulse, you can track your own interests in the blog universe. What's getting more attention -- Facebook, Myspace, or Twitter? Click on the Trend Search in BlogPulse, enter the three contenders, set a time period, and get a graph indicating the amount of buzz for each in a graph.

Or use the Featured Trends button in BlogPulse to browse for trends in news, sports, business, political events, science & technology, health, personal, and "bizarre stuff." Which of the 7 deadly sins are getting more attention in blogs? The answer is a click away in the "bizarre stuff" section of Featured Trends, where a graph indicates that Pride and Anger are getting more buzz than Envy or Gluttony.

Technorati identifies the top 5 blogs in Blogger Central and the amount of traffic at each. I can take those blog names over to BlogPulse to compare their traffic in a graph using Trend Search. Fortunately, the two sites agree in the rank order of the the blogs when I compare Engadget, Boing Boing and TechCrunch in a trend search at BlogPulse.