UPDATE: The Blogscope project is over. According to the notice on their website their products/services are now commercially used by Sysomos.
You've had your morning coffee, you've fed your pet goldfish, you've scanned today's headlines but still you can't decide on what to blog on. Look a bit farther off your immediate horizon but not with a telescope - use Blogscope.
Blogscope.net (Preview version) is a prototype research tool developed by the fine people at the Computer Science Department of the University of Toronto (wave to the audience and take a bow fellas!). You can use it to analyze and visualize trends in the blogosphere. Currently they are tracking over 12 million blogs and are offering a couple of widgets useful to bloggers young and old alike.
Summary Cloud
Below this site, you will see a live example of Blogscope's Summary Cloud which automatically collects keywords from your blog and displays it in what is more popularly referred to as a "tag cloud". Blogscope's summary cloud widget however does not require tags at all. Instead it crawls your site (fast, very fast!) and posts significant keywords which in turn links to blogscope's search results for that keyword along with its corresponding popularity curve and related terms.
Popularity Curve
The Popularity Curve can visualize to you how often the keyword was used within the blogging community over time. Red graph bars indicate "information bursts" which means something significant happened during that period related to the keyword. Clicking on the bars will give you a listing of blog entries specific to the keyword.
For example if you clicked on the red area at the Blogscope site to find out why there was a spike for blogging sometime during the end of August, you'd see that some nutcase repeatedly created a post over and over again - clearly a splog attack. It was also around this time that the Blogger trojan-spam was discovered.Comparison Curve
The Comparison Curve is similar to the Popularity Curve except that, well... it compares trends between two keywords. Note below that the graph for the keyword "blogging" is above the graph for "sex". This means that blogging is more popular than sex and.. good lord, what is the world coming to?!
Information provided at Blogscope is limited to within 30 results (blog posts) for each keyword queried. Furthermore, Blogscope.net states that this public preview of their technology is just the tip of the iceberg for what Blogscope can provide for the blogging community.If you want you can also check out their Demo screencast, because I sure didn't. It was loading too slow so I passed. Let me know if you guys think its Oscar material or just another home movie.
So the next time you need a push in the right direction on what's hot and what's not in the blogosphere, send your mouse a-clickin' over at Blogscope.net.
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1 comment:
EA,
Thanks for the low down on Blogscope.
Will give them a thorough review. Was looking for something like that.
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