Meme Wars: tracking popularity of memes over time

In addition to following voting reform blogs I follow a number of real estate investing blogs. Many of the real estate bloggers periodically post a market statistics update with some pretty graphs and charts. These posts are both informative and very easy to write.

For a while I’ve been thinking of doing similar posts that discuss the popularity of different memes within the voting reform community. My thought was that ideally I could identify which reforms have momentum behind them and track how interest changes over time. This can be useful in several ways:

• to better understand how the rest of the reform community spends their efforts
• to track whether I help increase interest in the reforms that I care about

After some poking around yesterday I found some tools to aid me in doing this. I’ll put up separate posts reviewing each tool. If you are aware of other tools, please leave a comment!