State of the Blogosphere

As a new blog owner it’s natural that I am constantly browsing new blogs and other blogging services, recently I registered at Technorati and claimed my weblog as a way to help its enormous community find and search my blog, as they recently celebrated 1 billion links Tracked also it’s now tracking more than 8.4 Million blog and that’s a HUGE number by all means.

I think Technorati is great and offer many helpful services besides indexing your blog like Watchlists which enables you to track what is happening on the web concerning any topic you choose, or you can track certain websites and blogs.
Also you can install their Search service on your blog, but what they really lack is the analytic power of its competitor BlogPulse.

BlogPulse provides amazing services for everyone, Top Links, Key Phrases, Key People, and Conversation Tracker but the best tool they have is Trend Tool, with it you can create your own Trend Graph comparing whatever things come to your mind to see what was popular and hot over any given period of time, you could play with it for hours without getting bored.

For an example here's a screenshot comparing Apple to iPod and Mac mini, and here’s a list of things that we can easily read from this Graph:

1- It proves that Apple popularity is mainly due to its iPod (no surprise here) especially after iPod Shuffle announcement that took place at MacWorld Expo (9-13 Jan).

2- The obvious spike in iPod Graph before Jan 1st is the result of its popularity as a Christmas gift.

3- iPod is generally increasing in popularity among bloggers.

4- It seems that Apple popularity is more closely related with iPod after MacWorld Expo, even with the introduction of Mac mini, maybe it’s an indicator that iPod Shuffle really filled a gap in the MP3 Players market for Apple.

I could go on and on with this analysis but it’s not my focus, the main point is to prove how much information you can gather from Graphs like this and how they really applies to the society and the changes that occur within.
Just imagine what you can come up with from thousands of other comparisons.

Blogging in general and Advanced Services like BlogPulse gave us a great way to measure the Pulse of the Tech-oriented society, and how every change affects them.

On the Business side, I’m sure Intelliseek is a perfect buy for any company willing to gain upper hand in the blogging world, like Google or MSN or even Yahoo, it’ll be a great companion to their blogging services, I’m wondering which company will make the move first or even if one of them is in the negotiation process right now, only time will tell.

In other news, I added a hit counter using www.sitemeter.com and it’s great so far, with more than enough info on blog statistics.