Deeper Insight into the Blogosphere
BlogPulse, Intelliseek's suite of tools for tracking trends and monitoring activities in the blogosphere, now has a cleaner look and a host of new features.
BlogPulse, Intelliseek's suite of tools for tracking trends and monitoring activities in the blogosphere, now has a cleaner look and a host of new features.
BlogPulse, Intelliseek’s suite of tools for tracking trends and monitoring activities in the blogosphere, now has a cleaner look and a host of new features.
Fundamentally, BlogPulse is a search engine focused on more than 14 million identified blogs. You can search by topic, blogger name, title or other keywords, or use the advanced search tools for even more focused queries.
In itself, BlogPulse’s search functionality is useful, but the site provides a number of other tools that provide insights into the broader environment of the blogosphere. The BlogPulse trend tool lets you compare the relative popularity of two or more words over time , for example yahoo vs. google over the past two months. This is great not only to gauge popularity or people or topics as expressed by the blogosphere, but is also useful as a competitive intelligence tool. For more, see my SearchDay article Tracking Trends via the Blogosphere.
BlogPulse also offers a number of pre-compiled analytics, aggregating each day’s top links, key people and key phrases, providing a snapshot of what’s currently popular among bloggers.
Best of all, Intelliseek makes most of BlogPulse’s features available via RSS feeds, so you automatically get updates in your preferred feed reader.
Today Intelliseek added four more daily analytics to BlogPulse: top blog posts, top blogs, top news stories and top news sources, as cited by bloggers.
A big problem for most people is how to determine the credibility of a blog or blogger. Many blogs lack even rudimentary “about me/us” information, and it’s hard to know who or what’s behind a blog.
To help make better sense of individual blogs, BlogPulse has introduced a new profiles tool. The profiles tool allows you to enter a blog’s URL and get all sorts of insights that may not otherwise be readily apparent about the blog. For example, you’ll see the blog’s
its rank (based on citations), rank trend, number of posts, post trend (based on volume over time), citation
trends and sources cited.
A really cool feature provided by the profiles tool is a blog’s “neighborhood,” links to ten other blogs that cite similar links and text.
Here’s the profile of our Search Engine Watch blog. Rank information is presently available only for the top 10,000 ranked blogs.
BlogPulse has also introduced its own new blog that focuses on entertainment information seen through the lens of the blogosphere, called BlogPulse Spotlight. This complements and supplements the existing BlogPulse Newswire with its running commentary on trends and hot topics.
Intelliseek has also made improvements to both the front and back end of the system. A newly designed user interface is cleaner and easier to use. The company has also invested in improving the freshness of its index.
Despite the addition of all this useful functionality, BlogPulse remains ad-free, and will likely continue to stay that way in the future, according to Sundar Kadayam, Intelliseek’s chief technology officer.
For years, marketers have been tracking consumers as they go to the web in response to DRTV spots and infomercials, as well as other forms of offline advertising. In an ideal world, every consumer would pay attention and jot down the web URL and type it correctly into their browser, so that marketers could properly allocate web orders to individual media placements and properly understand the true ROI of all marketing efforts.
But it’s not a perfect world, and consumers don’t always do what we want them to. As a result, yet another challenge has surfaced in tracking, reporting and analyzing offline response to online advertising.
Next week, I’ll be joining Paul Soltoff and Tim Daly, CEO and Director of Marketing and Strategy of SendTech, on a webcast that will explore the enormous impact that offline advertising has on search engine marketing, both on organic and on paid search listings. Unless measured and understood properly, offline efforts can easily throw off the allocation of expenses and sales to all channels. As a bonus, SendTech will be presenting actual results from research and case studies the company has conducted on the impact of offline advertising on search marketing campaigns.
The webcast is free for anyone to attend. For more information and to register for the webcast, visit the link below.
The Effects of DRTV on Search Engine Marketing
July 28, 2005 2:00pm EDT, 11:00am PDT
http://www.jupiterwebevents.com/webcasts/sendtec_july28.html
NOTE: Article links often change. In case of a bad link, use the publication’s search facility, which most have, and search for the headline.