Tracking blog buzz

BlogPulse’s Trend Search is a nice feature I haven’t seen before, where you can track different search terms in the blogosphere. Take a look at this graph covering the blog posts mentioning Coke and Pepsi the last two months. It shows that Coke is discussed more frequently than its rival. The two graphs are following each other very closely, which makes me suspect that the difference between the two is due to the fact that Coke is not only carbonated water but also a drug.

Here’s another example. The Swedish blogosphere seems to be discussing feminists (“feminister”) more often than social democrats (“socialdemokrater”) and liberals (“liberaler”), at least during International Women’s Day.

Also see BlogPulse’s new Conversation Tracker.

Podcasting a popular pastime

Almost a third, or 29%, of all owners of mp3-players in the US have listened to a podcast at least once reports Pew Internet & American Life Project in a new survey. That is a surprisingly high number, especially since podcasting hasn’t been around for that many months.

Hans #27

Jackie Huba at the Church of the Customer blog writes about a phenomenon called Google Juice, which is supposed to be “the ethereal substance which flows between web pages via their hyperlinks (in both directions!” and “the mysterious quality that causes pages to come up high in a Google search”. And since Google like blogs, bloggers get high rankings. For example, the number one Robert on Google is Microsoft überblogger Robert Scoble (except he’s really #4 when I try the search). Turns out I am Hans #27 on Google, and like Scoble, I don’t even have my name as the name of my blog. Other examples are Swedish blogger Henrik Torstensson, the #1 Henrik on Google, a few notches before writer Henrik Ibsen.

Radio Sweden podcast via Feedburner

Swedish Radio are testing podcasting for their English language program Radio Sweden. What is interesting to see is that they use free tools like Blogdrive and Feedburner. The articles are distributed via an RSS feed at Blogdrive (http://radiosweden.blogdrive.com/index.xml) and the podcasts via Feedburner (http://feeds.feedburner.com/RadioSweden). And I don’t think it’s wrong to rely on external solutions because it shows that they are eager to try new things and get started, rather than wait for internal procedures which almost always slow these kind of initiatives down. One negative effect though might be if they decide to change tools in the future and have a new URL, they might lose subscribers.

For some reason the mp3 files are posted to a free blog on Blogspot.com while the actual files are located on radiosweden.org.

Virgin Radio starts podcasting

Two weeks ago Virgin Radio became the first UK radio station to podcast a daily show. The shows are free thanks to advertising. Writes Brand Republic:

The programme will be around 40 minutes long and should be available from about 10.30am each morning for listeners to play back whenever they want. Ads will appear at the beginning and in the outro, with short ads interspersed through the programme.

This is quite interesting because it means that I will now have access to international radio even if I’m not strapped to my computer. It would also be interesting to see if this kind of advertising works or if listeners simply fast forward the ads.

Current.org has a list of broadcasters who podcast.