Category Archives: tools

(I am continuing to review a couple of online tools to track the popularity of ideas over time. Please forgive this segway away from voting reform issues.)

BlogPulse’s trend search tool is another service to track the popularity of search terms over time based on how many blogs mentioned them recently.

Their instructions:

Type your search terms in the boxes on the left. Type descriptive labels for each search into the boxes on the right. Then choose your time frame: 1, 2, 3 or 6 months.

They only allow three terms to be searched and graphed at a time.

Here is an example search of “evoting” vs “voting machine” vs “gerrymandering”. Of note in this sample is that the choice of keywords is very important. “voting machine” and “evoting” may be synonyms but they get very different results.

From my experimentation, it appears that they do NOT support advanced query syntax like boolean expressions in their trend tool.

Wishlist:

• add the ability to compare more than 3 searches per chart
• support advanced search features like boolean expressions and clearly document what is supported
• clearly state whether users are allowed to save trend graph images and host those images on their own sites.

(As I mentioned, I am reviewing a couple of online tools to track the popularity of ideas over time. Please forgive this segway away from voting reform issues.)

Icerocket’s blog trends tool is a service to track the popularity of search terms over time based on how many blogs mentioned them recently. Their instructions are simple:

Enter item(s) to see mentions trended over time. Enter up to three queries under Trend Term(s). Type in the label you would like associated with each query under Display Label(s).

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(As I mentioned, I am reviewing a couple of online tools to track the popularity of ideas over time. Please forgive this segway away from voting reform issues.)

Google Trends is a service by google that allows you to compare the popularity of keywords over time.

In their words:

With Google Trends, you can compare the world’s interest in your favorite topics. Enter up to five topics and see how often they’ve been searched on Google over time. Google Trends also shows how frequently your topics have appeared in Google News stories, and in which geographic regions people have searched for them most.

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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: Continue reading →