From Brussels-based company Attentio comes a new blog search engine and trend-tracking tool called Trendpedia. The service, now out of beta, lets you scan the blogosphere for trends to see what’s getting buzz. Trendpedia also lets you compose visualizations of those trends as charts and graphs, which can then be shared on the social web.
To use Trendpedia, you need only enter the keywords or phrases you wish to search for in the boxes provided. Enter one keyword, like “Twitter” for example, and Trendpedia will return a simple chart showing the ups and downs of that word over time, determined by counting the number of blog posts where the word was mentioned.
Enter in two or more keywords, like “Clinton vs. Obama vs. McCain,” and the graph will display a comparison of those terms using a different colored line for each. A pie chart will also display showing the percentages of mentions for each term throughout the blogosphere.
Tracking the Political Candidates
Beneath the charts are the blog search results for the items, with each term as a separate tab. The graphs themselves are interactive, too – you can click anywhere on the chart’s lines to see the articles from that particular date.
Trendpedia also offers advanced search tools from a separate page that let you perform searches using the word “AND” to search for multiple terms in one search to compare to multiple terms in a separate search. (Example: “twitter and jaiku” vs. “wordpress and typepad and blogger”) You can also make your own label for the searches which will appear on the chart that displays. (Ex: “microblogging” vs. “blogging”). The advanced search page also lets you specify which language to cull the search results from, if desired.
Blogging vs Microblogging
After performing the search, you can use the provided social media buttons to share the trend on del.icio.us, reddit, Digg, Facebook, StumpleUpon, or via email. However, a glaring omission is absence of an embed code for pasting the chart onto your blog or web site, forcing you to do screen grabs instead.
Trendpedia is clearly meant to be a competitor to Nielsen Media’s Blogpulse, a site which Peter Kim points out appears to be on “auto-pilot.” The Blogpulse homepage still features a section called “2005 Year in Review” and the latest news section’s last update is from April 2007. Trendpedia’s homepage, on the other hand, shows featured trends, popular trends last month, and popular trends last week. So, perhaps now with Tredpedia’s offering, we’ll start seeing some movement and innovation in this space once again.
Trendpedia homepage
