Tracking trends in the blogosphere

Another really interesting resource worth checking out is Intelliseek's BlogPulse trend search.

It allows you to get a feel for the ongoing conversation within the blogosphere by graphing how often certain terms are mentioned over time. It's completely customizable and autogenerates the graphs on demand.

As an illustration, in the first example below, I used the tool to compare the prevalence of blog mentions of three different political issues that have been top-of-mind within US media over the past six months - Iraq, Gay Marriage (two big pre-election issues), and more recently, euthanasia as part of the Terri Schiavo case.

The example below is more of an example of tracking of two 'hot' telecom trends.

The example below tracks three well-known competitors.

Technorati tags: PR, public relations, search, blogging