Google Blog Search is an invaluable tool for searching news and views off the beaten track. It scans the blog posts of the great and the good, spanning major companies to everyday journal writers.
Today Google have announced some key changes to the service. The alterations should make searching easier, more intuitive and user-friendly. The most notable key addition is the introduction of an RSS feed. This will provide quick updates straight to your feed reader on any number of desired topics.
As with other trending sites, including Twitter and Blogpulse, Google Blog Search now also includes Hot Queries. This will give you a rundown of the most popularly searched for terms, whilst Latest Posts notes the most popular stories being discussed.
No doubt further integration with the likes of Reader and iGoogle will come about, but Blog Search should now be a far more accessible tool. If you haven’t used it before, it’s well worth a look.
Follow this link for the complete Google Blog announcement.
The Parliamentary upheaval caused by the MP’s expenses scandal shows no sign of abating. Using the latest statistics provided by Blogpulse, it’s clear that our elected officials are still getting a pretty rough ride online as well as in Westminster and their constituencies.
If nothing else, this indicates the power that bloggers and professional news sources have. The blanket coverage, with the news represented from all angles and viewpoints, has been merciless. Major stories don’t simply appear and disappear like they may have done previously. Buzz can grow and continue to snowball through the ever-growing online blogging community as illustrated below.
This chart highlights the popularity of the term 'MPs Expenses'
Blogpulse gives a fantastic insight into what is popular at any one moment in time. It shows the peaks and troughs that all topics go through with clear charts and statistics. Anybody can simply search for a specific term or even a selection of different stories to find out exactly what is hot and identify those trends early.
The graphic below shows the relative popularity of three events that may well have people talking in the days to come. This compares the popularity of the terms ‘FA Cup’, ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ (both of which reach their final stage on Saturday) and ‘MP’s expenses’, just for a marker. From this we can see that Britain’s Got Talent is head and shoulders above the rest in terms of blog mentions and I think it would be a big surprise if that trend didn’t continue over the weekend too.
Comparative popularity of Britain’s Got Talent, FA Cup & MP’s Expenses
Whilst the results shown above may not be particularly useful to many businesses, it does give a clear indication of what the rest of the world is talking about. Plus you have the opportunity to shape the words searched for to suit your particular sector, there’s no boundaries to who or what can be analysed.
Whilst it can be a passing dalliance of interest and a bit of mischievous fun (see below for the comparisons of Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and talent show finalist Susan Boyle for clarification), understanding where the buzz is before anyone else can give you some real leverage, particularly in the competitive world of blogging.
Gordon Brown lags a long way behind both Boyle & Obama online
Although Nielsen Online, the owner of Blogpulse, describe it as an “automated trend discovery system for blogs“, in my opinion, this description doesn’t do it justice.
It goes far beyond that and is a valuable tool for anyone wishing to conduct online market research.
Blogpulse tracks blog activity constantly and you can use it to search by topic, brand or even URL to see who is blogging about you, your company or a topic you may be interested in.
For site owners, this is a gold mine of data and can be used in many ways. For example:
1. Trend Research
The site has free trend analysis so you can compare one, or more, terms with another.
Blogpulse Trend Research Example
2. Conversation Tracker
This feature is a great way to pick up on the ‘buzz’; to find out the flow of conversations on a particular topic across the web.
You could use Blogpulse to stimulate fresh ideas for articles, new web pages or simply to post comments yourself on the latest hot topics. Entering a term that is relevant to you or your business will instantly uncover blog posts that have been made recently on that subject giving you the opportunity to carry out further research or even post comments on these entries to position yourself as a subject matter expert and build up the link popularity for your site.
All in all, this is a really useful site offering free online market research and a ton of useful data.
