« PR’s 2006 Resolution: Become Accountable | Main | Podcasting: Still Not Going To Change The World »

Tools for Searching, Monitoring and Analyzing Blogs

Cymfony's Julie Woods recently spoke at a Boston-based conference called "The Pulse of Technology" for local small to mid-size businesses.  She was asked to talk about how companies of this size were using blogs.  Realizing that more than half of the attendees were not going to be familiar with blogging, Julie and I decided to start with the basics and pulled together a hand out for the attendees entitled "Tools for Searching, Monitoring and Analyzing Blogs."  Based on a number of conversations we've had this year, there still seems to be confusion around the different tools and services used for searching blogs vs. creating blogs vs. monitoring/analyzing blogs (and other types of user created content for that matter) so I thought I share a high level portion of the hand out that includes some of the hundreds of tools now available.

Tools for Searching Blogs

  • PubSub - Unlike traditional search engines that store indexed news and blog content, PubSub is an ad-supported matching service that allows users to enter terms to be matched against any new content created on the 16 million+ sources that PubSub watches. PubSub matches your terms against the new content and notifies you when there is a match. PubSub is used by many marketers and product managers to track mentions of their brands and competitors. As a free service, it provides a very useful competitive intelligence tool for anyone who wants to keep a pulse on a diverse range of topics and companies.
  • Google Blog Search - is a newer Google search technology that is primarily focused on blogs. Any site that publishes content via an RSS or Atom site feed can be searched by Google Blog Search. That includes news sites as well as blogs in English and many other languages. The search interface is very easy to use but it’s important to use the “Advanced Search” option to limit content to filter searches by language, titles, authors and more. When your results are returned, an additional link is provided that allows you to switch between displaying the results with either the most relevant or the most recent results at the top.
  • Yahoo! Blog Search - Yahoo! News now provides access to blogs as well as news. In addition to blog posts, they are providing links to Flickr photos and My Web, which is a large grassroots media network. Another new service from Yahoo! allows users to search podcast, which are self-published audio programs often created by bloggers. You can download podcasts into your computer or MP3 player. You can also subscribe to podcasts to quickly receive new episodes of programs when they are published.
  • Podscope, is an online service from TVEyes that searches every word within a podcast using audio indexing technology. TVEyes is a leader in broadcast search. This service is available free today in a beta version.
  • Technorati is a real-time blog search engine that determines the relevance of a site by the number of other sites that link to it. Technorati automatically receives notification from weblogs as soon as they are updated, so it can track the thousands of updates per hour that occur in the blogosphere, and monitor the communities (who's linking to whom) underlying these conversations. Technorati currently tracks over 23.9 million sites and over 1.8 billion links. Technorati is one of the oldest blog search engines with a massive archive of historical blog posts. Technorati is very useful for marketers that want to understand how the perception of products and issues has changed over time. While some links may be expired or irrelevant (and now spam blogs have become an issue), the tool provides a very useful starting point for performing blog research.
  • IceRocket  - is a search engine providing new ways for to find blog and news content. There are no ads displayed on IceRocket results. IceRocket also provides several tools that help marketer’s track links from site to site, identify quick trends in online discussion and uncover current blog topics.
  • Feedster is a search engine and advertising network that indexes over 19 million syndicated feeds per hour. This includes millions of blogs and over 75,000 professionally published news sources such as CNET and The New York Times. Feedster searches for the most recently updated news and information so the service is very useful for finding breaking news from both blogs and news services.

Tools for Creating Blogs

  • Blogger is a free blogging service owned by Google. Blogger provides templates to help you quickly set up a blog and share it with others. As one of the first blogging services, there are millions of Blogger sites but many are not updated actively. However, many individual bloggers have started with Blogger as their first blog-hosting platform.
  • LiveJournal from SixApart is a free blogging service for creating personal journals. The service hosts over 2 million journals. According to SixApart, LiveJournal's innovations include friend pages -- pages that enable users to easily view the recent journal updates of their LiveJournal friends. Additionally, with LiveJournal, users can have custom control over who can view their journal posts as well as join interest-based communities. LiveJournal is a good service for people who want to start blogging with friends about everyday topics. 
  • Typepad is another personal weblogging service from Six Apart that is used by many companies as well. Typepad allows you to create a blog for yourself or to share. Blogs can take on any form from personal journals to corporate blogs with multiple authors. You can easily set up a Typepad account for free. For a small fee, Typepad provides a professional edition that allows you to have more control over design elements of your blog as well as comments and other features. The Typepad website also provides many useful links to resources about blogs and blogging.
  • Movable Type - Also from Six Apart is a blog service called Movable Type that provides more advanced site design and development capabilities. For instance, Movable Type has the ability to store entries in a SQL database or create applications to solicit and receive input from visitors. Movable Type is a good option for marketers who have multiple audiences and blogs to support however it requires more advanced technical knowledge for installation and configuration.
  • WordPress is a semantic personal publishing platform that has a reputation for being very easy to work with for developers of more sophisticated blogs. In addition, WordPress provides many useful features for customizing your blog as well as managing comment spam that can be a huge problem. WordPress is a free service, however you can donate both money and time to assist with hosting, documentation development and other costs of supporting the service.

Tools for Monitoring/Analyzing Blogs

  • Bloglines is a free online service for searching, subscribing, creating and sharing news feeds, and blogs. Most people use Bloglines as a blog aggregation tool to track updates from their favorite blog sites. This can reduce the amount of time you need to spend searching blogs to see if there have been any updates. The new posts are listed with links back to the original content. You can set up a Bloglines account for free and start monitoring blogs and news immediately. Bloglines also provides recommendations of top blogs to help you get started.
  • NewsGator Online is a free news aggregation service that feeds content from news and blogs into Microsoft Outlook. If you spend a great deal of time using Outlook every day, this service can be very useful for monitoring industry news and key blogs without leaving Outlook.
  • BlogSquirrel is a blog searching and clipping service from CyberAlert. BlogSquirrel’s online services reach over 5 million blogs each day. While the service is not free, many people like the idea of having a low-cost service organize and search for a set of mentions of their brands that can be combined into a Digital Clip Book and delivered via email daily.
  • BlogPulse is a blog search engine by Intelliseek that also provides quick buzz tracking and trend charting tools. Like Technorati, BlogPulse has access to historical blog mentions for the millions of blog sites they have access to. This tool is useful for a quick glimpse of online discussion trends however it does not filter out duplicate or irrelevant mentions to a level required for marketing research and analysis.
  • Memeorandum is a specialized news and blog search aggregator focused on politics and technology. It has a very clean user interface similar to Google News that shows hot topics and related posts grouped together. You can even choose to view related discussions on topics.  This tool can be useful to marketers who need to know what the hot topics are in politics, current affairs and technology at any given moment. It leverages many of the other blog and news search tools to gather content.
  • Orchestra - Cymfony has been providing media analysis solutions to Fortune 2000 clients for several years. We started integrating blog content into an automated and custom research solutions in 2004. Because of the tremendous impact of blogs on journalists and traditional media, the firm now offers an integrated media analysis dashboard application that automatically monitors and analyzes mainstream media (MSM) as well as blogs, usenet groups, online forums and other forms of social and consumer-generated media (CGM) under one converged Web-based service platform. Cymfony also provides guidance from experts on the blogosphere to assist companies and agencies with blog analysis strategy, product launches, event analysis, reputation monitoring and customized research. Large corporations and agencies as well as medium-sized companies with highly visible brands are the most common users of Cymfony’s products and services.

NOTE:  There are certainly more tools and services available in each of these catagories.  This is just a general list and resource to help get started.

, , ,

Posted by Cymfony on December 27, 2005 at 10:34 AM | Email this post Permalink

TrackBack

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00d8341cdcdc53ef00d83559843769e2

Listed below are links to weblogs that reference Tools for Searching, Monitoring and Analyzing Blogs:

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.