New Service on Google Blogsearch: Memetracking

Via Problogger we learn that Google Blogsearch is now tracking the most popular memes in the blogosphere. Darren makes a great point:

It isn’t a new concept – TechMeme, Technorati, Blogs.com and others have been doing it for years – however what strikes me here is just how comprehensive Google’s results are. While TechMeme only indexes a limited number of blogs Google’s BlogSearch has been indexing millions (?) of blogs for some time now and will be able to provide a different perspective to what is happening in the wider blogosphere (instead of just the cool gang).

The official Google Blog has more:

Today, we’re pleased to launch a new homepage for Google Blog Search so that you too can browse and discover the most interesting stories in the blogosphere. Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, we’re now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event. Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives. When you look within a cluster, you’ll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere.

Here is what it looks like in action. This graph represents the number of blogs covering tonight’s Vice Presidential debate:

ReadWriteWeb is calling it a “techmeme killer”. What do you think?

Technorati State of the Blogosphere: Intro and Day One

It is that time of year again. Technorati has begun the five-day release of their State of the Blogosphere report.

Welcome to Technorati’s State of the Blogosphere 2008 report, which will be released in five consecutive daily segments. Since 2004, our annual study has unearthed and analyzed the trends and themes of blogging, but for the 2008 study, we resolved to go beyond the numbers of the Technorati Index to deliver even deeper insights into the blogging mind.

This report has been extremely valuable to me in the past. I’ll be following it for the next several days.

Here are some of the more interesting items in the first two sections in the report.

In August 2008, blogs had 77.7 million unique visitors in the United States.

There are 76,000 blogs with a technorati authority greater than 50. This means that at least 50 other blogs have linked to them in the past six months.

Here are is some information on the demographics of the blogosphere:

Identifying Bloggers in Your Niche

The first step in reaching out to bloggers is locating your target audience. The best way to do this is to create a list of the types of bloggers you would like to contact, and use the search engines below to locate them.

For example, if you are reaching out on behalf of an environmental organization, you might search for bloggers writing about keywords such as: Environment, Climate Change, Global Warming, Nature, Energy Policy, etc.

Below you’ll find step-by-step instructions for locating bloggers in your target audience with each of the top four blog search tools.

Powerpoint on Driving Traffic to Websites

Open Source Reddit, Technorati’s Ad Network and Keyword Research

Great news for anyone interested in social news, Reddit has just gone open source.

Today we’re excited to announce that we’re open sourcing reddit. We’ve always strived to be as open and transparent with our users as possible, and this is the next logical step. When we say ‘open-source’ we mean specifically that the code behind reddit is available to the public for download, and we’re inviting the public to submit code to help improve the site.

Reddit is unique in the social news scene in that we have a huge community of developers. It seems only natural that we give you all in that community a chance to contribute back to reddit and make it a better place for everyone. We know reddit’s success has less to do with our technology than it does with you, our community, and now we want to let our community improve our technology.

This is fantastic, and bodes well for the future of Reddit in the social news market. They are proving, once again, that they really get it.

Since reddit’s beginning, we have stood on the shoulders of giants in the open source world. Every library, tool and platform we depend on is open. Until now, the only portion of reddit that wasn’t freely available is reddit itself. We are proud and excited that we’re finally giving back to the community that has given us so much.

Via Tech Crunch, , the leading blog search engine, has launched an ad network for blogs.

Technorati was founded to help bloggers to succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the online global conversation. As the leading blog search engine and most comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere, we index more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time and introduce millions of readers to blog and social media content.

Technorati Media extends our service and value by matching bloggers and social media creators with marketers who want to join the conversation.

Others in this space include Common Sense Media, Blogads and Federated Media.

Search Engine Journal has a good piece on Tools to find your competitor’s keywords. These tools can be useful when determining which keywords you want to optimize your site for.