7 Ways to Track Internet’s Trends and Popular News
It doesn’t matter if you are a news reporter, a blogger, or just a regular guy who want to find the trends around the Internet, you want to be productive and use as little time as possible to find what’s popular and new.
For me, I want to stay on top of technology and software related news, and to tell you the truth - I wouldn’t want to spend more than a tick to get what I want to see, or find out if it is popular. I want to introduce seven ways of tracking trends and popular resources online.
Watch Alexa Stat. There are two visit points. Alexa Traffic details and Movers. Alexa Traffic details gives you access on web site traffic estimations based on Alexa’s users population. With the dynamically generated graph, You could compare up to five different sites on traffic. Alexa Movers provides you with a view on which sites gain the most traffic recently. It is a terrific way to track on sites which have just hit the upward traffic (which is what we call a trend on the Internet). If you are using Firefox, download SearchStatus. It’s an excellent extension with Alexa Ranking display plus other great information on the site.
Track Technorati. It is a blogging search engine. “Does it do searches only?”, you ask. For trend watcher, they have three more things for you - a popular page which shows the popular videos, movies, news and books bloggers have written about; a tag page which displays the popular tags for the hour. It also could help you to track posts which bloggers have tagged; and third, if you take a look at the tag search result, you see a nice trend graph. Take Apple iPhone for example, let’s see how the trend goes at the moment:
Look at PageRank. Not as useful as other methods, but it shows you overtime how many external pages have been linked to the page you are on. PageRank depends on the volume of incoming links. Number of incoming links can be one of the ways to judge if the content is worthwhile at all. I recommend SearchStatus instead of Google Toolbar to get the PageRank info as SearchStatus is more lightweight with tons of features.
Read Digg. It is great. Sometimes it gets news much faster than mainstream media and bloggers. But sometimes the news that hit frontpage are just plain useless for me. So subscribe or read a specific topic section.
Read Slashdot. I know, it is pretty old school. But they still feature some breaking news about the technical and technology industry.
Read news aggregators. Instead of going to newspaper sites and read breaking news and trends, subscribe aggregators like Google News and Techmeme.
Use your Feed Readers. Find several frequently updated sites with feeds. Subscribe their feed with your feed reader. Track them all at once. As this is your own selections, I recommend to keep down the number of subscriptions, or at least categorize your feed into two areas. A trend watching area which is an area you read often, and Others which is a folder with less important feeds. Keep the noise vs signal ratio low.
Hope these seven ways will save you time on tracking trends and popular stuff online. Got any more tips? Comment them here or send them to tips at lifehack.org
Tags: 
Get your own Avatars at 
Loading ...
Comments
Walt says on January 25th, 2007 at 11:42 am
I like Newsmap. Nice graphical depiction the popularity of the stories. Plus you can see what is hot in other countries (especially if you can read them).
Walt
Jay says on January 25th, 2007 at 10:26 pm
You might want to add Compete.com and http://blog.compete.com to your list.
Stats are much more reliable than Alexa’s.
Leon says on January 25th, 2007 at 10:44 pm
@Jay: Thanks for dropping by. Would you elaborate the differences between Alexa and Compete and how Compete is more reliable than Alexa?
Jay says on January 26th, 2007 at 4:29 pm
Leon,
Take a look at http://blog.compete.com/where-.....come-from/
for a direct comparison chart between Compete, Alexa, comScore, Hitwise and Nielsen.
Leon says on January 26th, 2007 at 7:42 pm
@Jay: Sounds like a great service. I like the multiple sources from ISPs, ASPs, Opt-In Panels (Do you guys disclose how many of those are opted in?)
A question: How does tracking US traffic is superior than tracking International market?
That probably does not brother me as a trend watcher (as most of the online trend do initiate from US), but it brothers me a bit that I couldn’t see the trend dally. For me, it is too long to wait and monitor the site’s traffic trend monthly. Usually trend comes and goes in matter of days.
Nevertheless it’s a good service, I will use it and see if it fits my daily trend watching activity.
sirNitti says on January 27th, 2007 at 1:56 am
they forgot about zeitgeist– what people, the major of society are googling, searching for on Google. this is very important, to know what others are seeking out
Jay says on January 27th, 2007 at 3:49 am
Leon,
The entire panel is 100% opt-in and permission based.
Compete normalizes traffic, and creates estimates based on a sound/time tested stats methodology (we’ve been around for 5+ years). We concentrate on being the *most precise/best* U.S. service. We rather be the best in one market vs. try to estimate all traffic and produce less accurate estimates.
We would like start doing International traffic projections soon. One thing at a time
Do drop me an email, if you think of any ways to improve the service.
Jay
Jay says on January 27th, 2007 at 3:54 am
… and look out for more frequent updates soon (maybe even daily
Jonathan Aquino says on January 27th, 2007 at 4:06 am
For those who like the delicious/popular feed, I’ve created a feed that augments it with delicious-user-created descriptions. Search for “descriptious”. Useful!
Skid says on January 27th, 2007 at 8:33 am
I would also recommended del.icio.us’ popular pages.
leigh says on February 4th, 2007 at 10:52 pm
There is also the trend watcher which maps trends in google results over time
marco at Google Earth says on February 11th, 2007 at 1:17 am
Hi, not sure if this has been mentioned but to keep on top of news I fully recommend subscribing to Google alerts, here’s the link:
http://www.google.com/alerts?hl=en
john says on March 16th, 2007 at 1:28 pm
It’s pretty good to have articles like this one, where somebody invests his valuable
time in order to get a list of the best for list building,internet marketing.No doubt you’ve
heard that list building is an absolute must,Resources to help internet marketers and online
business people use eBay for list building and cash flow generation.wanna know more
information about internet marketing login to http://www.yourimsuccess.com/getpaid/