One such evolution in site analytics comes from a startup called Reinvigorate. Where Google has reigned supreme in delivering detailed statistics about site usage and traffic with their free analytics service, it’s fallen short on delivery of that information in real-time. Let’s take a look at the way Reinvigorate can be utilized to achieve a clearer picture of visitor behavior, and how it might work towards achieving the goal of increased awareness between website owners and their users.

Who Goes There?

While having the ability to see how many visitors you might have on a given day is helpful, being able to know how many visitors are on your site right now is valuable. It’s valuable for determining how and when to scale up your site’s infrastructure to accommodate higher loads of traffic. It’s valuable to determine if you’ve suddenly been linked from a high-profile blog or news outlet. It’s also the key metric Reinvigorate features at their core that set them apart from Google – showing exactly how many active visitors are on your site at any given time.

Re-Invigorating, Isn’t It?

Reinvigorate is a site analytics application that offers the ability to see not only how many visitors you have, but also their names, and where they’ve just come from. In addition, you can see the actions taken by these users as they happen. Some of these actions include posting a comment, or becoming a new user – activities that can even have an associated sound effect (such as a satisfying “cha-ching” any time a user makes a purchase) when viewed in Reinvigorate’s desktop tool called Snoop. Snoop is a quick, free download for Windows or Mac that instantly keeps you updated with the latest happenings occurring on your site.

Where Google sometimes lags behind, the web interface of Reinvigorate allows you to dig deep into granular metrics by not only the year, month, and day – but also by the hour. Referrals, session activity, visitor details, and navigation paths are all available nearly immediately as they occur. Features on the horizon for Reinvigorate include scalable charts and graphs of all of the immediate data, and heatmaps to pinpoint exactly where and how often your pages’ content is clicked – in real-time.

Reinvigorate is free to sign up for and use during their beta testing phase, and offers a tour of their offerings at their site so you can see for yourself how the real-time site analytics data it collects can be visualized. Installation is a simple Javascript code block added to pages you wish to track – or if you’re a WordPress or Drupal user, an even easier plug-in download is available to get you up and running immediately.

Isn’t It Time?

The bottom line is that if you’re not paying attention to your users’ actions and behaviors as they occur, you’re missing out on a wealth of information that can be the tipping point to lead your website’s success. Reinvigorate’s strength is its ability to discover more knowledge about your users than ever before. While Google Analytics remains an industry stalwart, new innovations from companies like Reinvigorate can offer cost-effective solutions to stay connected in today’s real-time web environment.

Consider The Alternatives

In addition to Reinvigorate, other companies offering real-time site analytics services include Chartbeat, Clicky, ClickTale, and Woopra. See also: Free Traffic Analytics Tools you Should Know About.

Which analytics service do you use and is it real-time?

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Well here are some web site traffic tracking websites that can tell you what you need to know.

(Note, these are not web services for tracking traffic on your website. These websites basically estimate the traffic levels of other websites based on a number of publicly available factors. For tracking traffic on your website refer to free traffic analytics tools.)

Google Adplanner

I think that Google AdPlanner should be your first stop to check out any stats about a particular website. As it is mainly for advertisers looking at website statistics to see if it is worthwhile to advertise on a particular site, this makes it a great option to get accurate and reliable data.

Face it, what doesn’t Google know? They have data on nearly every website but that is another issue. As you can see from the stats for MakeUseOf, anyone can tell how many visits we get and what type of people regularly read us. It is also good as you can select to show data from one particular country.

Alexa

Alexa is another popular web site traffic tracking site and it is owned by Amazon. Although it involves a lot of clicking to get your results, it has proven to be useful. As you can see by the image, you have a lot of stats that you can browse through.

Compete

Compete is another great website to see how many visitors go to a website. However, there are a lot of limitations if you do not have a pro account. But apart from that, you can save the graph as an image. Overall, if you want a nice graph of a website’s growth (or decline) Compete is a nice option.

BizInformation

Biz Information is a great website as not only does it provide you with a graph of unique website visitors (from Compete) but it also tells you how much it is worth (although I don’t know how accurate it is).

The other good thing about Biz Information is that it also tells you how many submissions it has in popular social networking websites such as Digg and Stumbleupon.

So do you think the owners of MUO will sell for that price? With nearly 100,000 subscribers, who knows?

Quantcast

With Quantcast, you have a few options to play with. You can change the graph to show by day, week, month and to select a range of dates to show from one week to all time. Another great thing about Quantcast is that it shows you the US demographics of visitors such as age, sex, income, children and education level. But I would think Google Adplanner would be better.

URL Trends

URL Trends has a nice user interface and well placed ads, so be careful what you are clicking. But the web site traffic tracking that they provide is good. As you can see from the image, it shows where users are coming from, and you can find more details as you read from the ‘report navigation’ links. If you have a paid subscription, you can download your report in a PDF format.

Which tracking tools do you use to look for visitor stats for websites you find?   Let us know in the comments.

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• Su.pr – An Extraordinary URL Shortener from StumbleUpon (13)
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• View Your Website’s Visitors’ IP Address & Keep Statistics (14)

Increasingly, you’ll turn to Twitter. Twitter is rapidly becoming a place for people to share and discuss music, and is a great way to find new and interesting things to listen to. Lots of artists are active on Twitter, as are countless fans. But Twitter presents a new problem: how do you weed through that to find the good stuff?

Well, for a long time, according to The Hype Machine, a tracker of popular music around the Web, there was no good answer. There were answers, sure, but none did what they were supposed to do.

So The Hype Machine created the Twitter Music Chart, a brand-new way of tracking what is the most popular type of music in the Twitterverse. It’s the Billboard Hot 100 meets what you actually care about – a winning combination, in my book.

The Twitter Music Chart is created based on a very particular formula, simply described on the website: “Each tweet gets points based on the user’s influence, then we add them up to find what’s hot in the past 3 days.”

This is a novel, and smart, way of creating the charts. It’s not just measuring what people are talking about (though it’s certainly doing that) – it’s figuring out how many people are likely to be listening to a song that got tweeted. If Ashton Kutcher tweets a song, odds are some of his 2.5 million followers are going to listen to it – thus, it gets more points from The Hype Machine than if I tweeted it.

When you go to the Twitter Music Chart, you’ll see the most popular songs on Twitter over the last three days. You can see the title and artist of the song, who originally tweeted it, who else has tweeted it, the number of points it got (the number used by The Hype Machine to figure out where the song belongs), and even gives you a chance to listen to the song.

If you click on a song, it’ll take you to a page that lets you share the song on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere, as well as see more of who’s talking about it and how to buy it. If you vote for the track on Twitter, it’ll immediately get added to the votes on the Twitter Music Chart.

The biggest problem is that the list is only pulled from, and The Hype Machine only cares about, links from Twitter to The Hype Machine. Because of that, the list tends to be very niche-heavy, but I’ll say I still loved a lot of the music that came up. Tons of remixes and mashups, as well as some old classics – the music really runs the gamut.

If you’ve got an account with The Hype Machine, you can log in to favorite a particular song to your account, for easy access later. Otherwise, pretty much everything on the page is available to you. Across the bottom of the screen lives the player, where you can play, pause, or even buy a track from a variety of sources.

If you’re a Twitter user, you can follow the Hype Machine Twitter Account for tweets of the latest popular songs – delivering the popular stuff right into your Twitter stream.

One other thing I enjoyed about the Twitter Music Chart was the link, on the right side of the page, to check how many points The Hype Machine would give you for a tweeted song. It’s another measure of your Twitter influence, but is fun to cross-check with all the other people promoting songs.

It’s not a perfect chart, and nothing will be until it deals with all the music around Twitter, but it’s a great step in the right direction, and a cool way to find new music online.

What other online music charts are out there?

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

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We used to say that about the rest of the Internet, but social networking has lead many of us to talk as if the rest of the blogosphere and Web has become some antiquated dinosaur of information sharing.

The truth, however, is that the rest of the Web is still ridiculously fast as a source for information – if you know where to look. All those tweets and Facebook updates? They tend to come from stories or notices on the rest of the Web. But for breaking news in more than a couple of sentences, the Web is the dominant presence by far.

That’s what OneRiot, a real-time search for the whole Web, is taking advantage of. Instead of tracking what people are saying, as Twitter search engines like Scoopler do, it tracks what they’re talking about.

The OneRiot team describes what they’re trying to do quite well

When you search for a popular subject using other realtime search engines, your search results will show you a stream of chatter happening around that subject. Essentially, those search results are saying, “Your query is a hot term! Lots of people are talking about it!” However, what can be hard to find there is the actual source of the chatter – the news stories, blog posts or Web pages that started it all. If you were to search for that same popular subject using OneRiot, you’d find the actual content people are talking about – search results that say, “Check out this page, or blog, or video! Lots of people are talking about it!

OneRiot isn’t a traditional search engine, nor does it pretend to be. It’s not a place to find static information, or look up something interesting; it’s a place to find out who won the big game, or who got voted off of American Idol (not that I love that show or anything…). Information is sorted by timeliness as much as relevance, meaning newer material, even if it’s not the most complete source of information on a given topic, rises to the top.

You use OneRiot like you would any other search engine: go to the site and enter a search term. You can search either Web or Video (which is smart, because videos tend to be more viral than any other medium), and pick almost any topic. Underneath the search bar, there’s a list of “Trending Topics,” which tracks some of the most popular stories at the moment.

Once you’ve searched, you’ll see a list of results, formatted to help you figure out what to see. The results page gives you a headline, a snippet of the page, as well as a few useful “real-time” tips: who shared it first, when it was most recently shared, and how many people have shared it. OneRiot gets these numbers from Twitter and Digg, as well as a number of popular OneRiot apps, like the Shareaholic plugin for Firefox. You can see, at a glance, how many people are talking about a story, and even expand the window to see what they’re saying.

You can see the results truly in real-time, or choose to see the “Pulse,” which lends more importance to popular stories, by clicking at the right side of the top of the results. Either see things as they’re coming in, or see what’s hot (and still pretty brand-new). On the right side of the page is the “Most Shared Today” list, sort of like the Digg frontpage. It’s got five hot stories, and is itself a great way to figure out what’s going on.

As events unfold and stories develop, it can often be hard to track what people are talking about, and what is being said about important issues. OneRiot sifts through it for you, and lets you tap into the whole popular Web to see what’s really breaking news.

How do you find what’s popular and breaking on the Web?

Photo: Ben Sutherland

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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It is called Chromomulator. Chromomulator decides what’s hot (and therefore potentially interesting for you as well) by looking at what people are looking for. This is achieved by fetching the top trending topics from Google Trends.

Once it has the top 100 topics, Chromomulator aggregates news items, blog posts, pictures and videos about them from Google News, Digg, Delicious, Technorati, Flickr and Youtube respectively — all into one convenient place.

So hop over to Chromomulator and you see the current top 100 Internet searches neatly laid out in two separate columns on each side of the webpage. Some of the topics are well suited for pictures and images, while other are not, so don’t be surprised if Flickr and YouTube do not return results for quite a few topics.

Chromomulator offers RSS feeds that help you stay atop of the trending topics or you could follow @chromomulator on Twitter.

Idea for the mashup is great, however there are a few chinks that are evident. First off by the looks of it, the trending topics appear to be from Google Trends (USA). While some of the trending topics would be the same all over the world in particular situations (think recent MJ searches), what about the trending topics “in your part of the world”? This is what I mean (trending topics for USA and India):

For best results, you need to refresh often (you can use ReloadEvery addon) because the ranked trending topic changes. If you haven’t refreshed from the time you last loaded the page, the results on Chromomulator will not reflect the true ranked trending topics on Google Trends. This was the one thing I found quite annoying: you click on a link hoping to read about Transformers because that is what the #X topic when you last loaded Chromomulator, instead you will be taken to details of what actually is #X on Google Trends currently.

That said, it a great idea and has a huge potential for expansion, it would be interesting to see how Chromomulator develops further. Meanwhile, you let us know what you think of Chromomulator’s results.

Does it capture what you would call the buzz? How do you stack it against Twitter or popurls as a tool for capturing the top Internet searches? Let us know in the comments.

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Yet at the same time, we as a public feel the need to fuel these fires by constantly promoting such things. Just like with the buying and selling of stocks, if you mis-time your information, you might have just let the jackpot go.

Feel like you’re lagging behind lately in the viral video scene? Feel like everyone’s talking about some new video posted on Youtube that you missed out on? Feel like you’re missing out on the next Susan Boyle? If you feel that you haven’t getting your latest dose of “viral-ness” lately, here are some sites to check out.

Buzzfeed

The name says it all. It’s what the web is abuzz about, with a slight twist on things. Buzzfeed, the so-called “viral web in real-time,” incorporates something of a badge system in which people can tag certain issues, whether it be news articles, viral videos, or images and the such with exclamations that capture the essence of the viral issue.

Let’s take a look at an example.

These are the top viral issues over a certain period of time, as voted on by people who visit the site. In response to certain posts, users can also follow up with their own “badge” emoticons and tag their comments with other related images or videos. In a sense, it is a forum of weird and interesting things that are currently going on all around the web.

Just like any other blog, there’s archives, different categories (ranging from geeky to lol to omfg to cute), and a social network in which you can build a widget and request to link your site to Buzzfeed. Then again, if you’re really lazy (or you don’t know how to read), here’s another one:

Viral Video Chart

The concept behind Viral Video Chart is rather simple. Aggregate search or viewing data over a certain period of time and compile which videos garnered the most page views. In short, they count the number of times each video is linked to and the number of times each video is embedded, and make lists of the top videos over various periods of time.

So, whether you want to see the top videos of the past year, month, or week, Unruly Media’s Viral Video chart will most definitely satisfy your need of figuring out what exactly everyone is watching.

Remember, these sites are for your time wasting viewing pleasure only. If you’re interested in a more consolidated database of what’s hot on the web, check out these sites:

popurls.com – Lists the current popular headlines circulating around the internet on one single page.  Sites are sorted according to original medium (Youtube, Digg, Yahoo).

alltop.com -  Updates popular headlines every hour and sorts them based on categories (fashion, technology, gaming).

Wikirage.com – Displays which Wikipedia webpages were updated or edited over a certain span of time. Most likely, if the page was edited multiple times within a time period, something’s up!

Still not satisfied? Then check out our article on 21 sites to find out what’s hot online.

What do you think? Have any better sites than the ones I listed above to get your daily dose of what’s hot online? Shout it out in the comments!

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• Discover the Hottest Top Internet Searches with Chromomulator (9)
• 21 Sites To Find Out What’s Hot Online (78)
• Find Out What’s Hot Right Now On The Web With OneRiot (5)
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• YouTube.com – Online Video Sharing Site (23)

One of my favorite stories regarding this topic just happened a few days ago. Shaquille O’Neal, a popular basketball player and a popular Twitterer, found out via Twitter that he was being traded. Funny stuff. But the point is, if you want to know what’s happening, immediately, Twitter’s where you want to be.

Unfortunately, Twitter’s search engine leaves a lot to be desired. The native search frequently brings up incomplete results, both in a current search and going back. Plus Twitter search seems to frequently be down, and always be shoddy.

The best alternative, and a great way to track and search Twitter, is Scoopler. Scoopler is a fast, real-time or in other words live search engine for Twitter – that’s also got some cool features of its own. It does its main job well, and adds just enough features to make it miles ahead of Twitter’s own search.

For the sake of full explanations, Scoopler also searches results from Flickr, Digg, Delicious, and a few other sites – given the relative slowness with which these sites are updated, Twitter tends to both dominate search results and be the most functional use of Scoopler’s search.

Scoopler’s search is truly real-time. When you search for a word or phrase (pick your own, or use one of the popular ones Scoopler suggests), you’re taken immediately to a waterfall-looking column of tweets, that updates as new ones come in. Frequently, it’s too fast to read, especially if you’re tracking a popular subject; you can easily pause the updates if you need to catch up.

In addition, Scoopler does an excellent job with multimedia stuff – videos, images, links, and the like. Within the stream of tweets on your topic, Scoopler extracts all the videos, image, and links to a convenient sidebar, where it organizes them by type, and by the number of shares. If a video is being passed around, you can see it without digging through the stream to figure out what it is you’re looking for. You can easily share anything on Scoopler, too, just by clicking “Peek.”

One thing I like to do periodically is click the “view all” button on the home screen – this tracks all of the most popular topics at once. First of all, the speed at which they update is crazy. Second of all, it’s a lot like skimming news headlines, and is a great way to get caught up on what’s happening.

One day, I predict, Twitter will fix its search – it’ll probably look a lot like Scoopler, actually. But for now, Scoopler seems to be one of the best of a small number of Web apps that let you search and track what’s happening on Twitter and in the world, pretty much at the speed of light.

As Twitter becomes even more of a source for breaking news, editorial opinion, and the like, keeping tabs on what’s hot on Twitter will become even more important and useful. Scoopler’s an excellent and simple way to do exactly that.

How do you search Twitter? Is there even a need to? Go ahead and discuss in the comments.

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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If “yes” is the answer to both of the questions, then today’s post on what’s hot online and how to spot internet hot trends is right for you!

Use meme trackers to spot daily hot trends:

• Google Blogsearch that was turned into a meme tracker only a few months ago tracks memes throughout all topics and naturally has the biggest index to check.
• Megite separates memes into categories (technology, entertainment, business, science, etc) and often publishes completely irrelevant memes in each.
• Techmeme is the most popular technology meme tracker which is known to be the fastest to catch hot tech news.

Use blog search engines to spot daily hot trends:

• Technorati Popular gives the list of top searches and top blogs (that have become hot in the past 48 hours).
• BlogPulse key phrases allows for a “trend this” option that graphically represents the hot trend history.

Use search engines to spot daily hot trends:

• Yahoo Buzz. Besides giving a list of the most popular terms, the service reveals the daily buzz score (i.e. ”the percentage of Yahoo! users searching for that subject multiplied by a constant to make the number easier to read“) and the move (i.e. how fast this has become popular).
• Google hottest trends gives a huge list of the most popular search terms. The best thing about the service is that it is constantly updated throughout the day.
• MSN A-list lists daily popular headlines, top videos and movies and even most searched people and sport stories.
• Aol.com hot searches shows you its “hot searches” of the previous day. They also add their own commentary to each search term explaining what the buzz is about.
• Top Ask.com updates you on the most popular terms in general search, news search and even on most searched movies (past week). It will also show you top advancing searches (those that are the fastest to get popular).

Use social media sites to spot daily hot trends:

• Check the front pages of social voting sites: Digg, Reddit, etc.
• Delicious displays the huge cloud of most popular tags. Popacular lists the most popular Delicious bookmarks (also works for Twitter hot discussions).
• StumbleUpon lists its popular tags in the form of two tag clouds: one is for most recent topics and the other – for most popular “all time”.
• PopURLs aggregates the list of popular discussions from Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Yahoo Buzz and others.
• Flickr lists topics that have become popular in the last 24 hours, over last week or have always been hot.
• Deletionpedia (not exactly about the social media but still about discussions) offers you the list of most controversial (most discussed and then deleted) topics in Wikipedia.

Use Twitter tools to spot daily hot trends:

• Tweet Meme, as the domain name suggests, tracks and displays Twitter memes in a handy threaded style.
• Twit Scoop shows “what’s hot right now” in the form of a tag cloud and the “Hot trends” list.
• TwittUrly displays hottest memes in a Digg-like style (where Tweets = Votes).

Use ecommerce sites to spot daily hot trends:

• Amazon tag cloud shows which tags Amazon customers use to classify products.
• EBay pulse displays popular eBay searches.

Have I missed anything? Please add your method of spotting popular internet trends!

Did you like the post? Please do share your thoughts in the comments section!

New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

• 5 Websites to Check Out Latest Buzz and Viral Videos (7)
• Find Out What’s Hot Right Now On The Web With OneRiot (5)
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It’s also a good idea to look at Mark’s Twitter Tools Apps & Bots article as well as Jason’s Twitter tools article.

Twhirl – Desktop Twitter Client

Twhirl is an Adobe Air application which we have already mentioned here on Make Use Of, and I love it so much I have only used the web interface about twice.

Once you install it you can send direct messages, view replies, simply tweet away or you can view friends, followers, in short, everything you can do on the web.

In addition, the interface is beautiful, with icons displayed just the way they should, interface behaving intuitively and a boatload of skins right out of the box. Minimizing the application puts it on your system tray where it notifies you of Twitters and lets you send with one click.

Alternatively, if Adobe Air isn’t your particular cup of tea, take a look at Twadget, a Vista sidebar widget for Vista (obviously). The functions it offers are considerably less, but development is active, so you can expect new releases soon.

Twist – Twitter trends

Both a tool for fun, but also a serious potential marketing tool, Twist brings you the lowdown on trends on Twitter. Since so many people are Twittering, getting a glimpse of what they are saying could give you loads of information on anything really. You can find out about breaking stories before anyone else, create some interesting statistics for an essay or post, or find out which topic is hottest right now.

Bloggers and website owners can use this tool to track their hype, but also to determine the hottest topics to write about, or upcoming topics they should be researching soon. You can take a look at the list on the left for hot topics, but you can also go into minute detail and look at exactly what people are saying about the topic you entered.

TwittyTunes – Post music and websites to Twitter

If you know FoxyTunes, you will be familiar with the look and feel of TwittyTunes, a Firefox extension which lets you post a number of things to Twitter with just one click.

Basically it’s a simple Twitter client with some pre-defined text available inside Mozilla. You can use it in conjunction with FoxyTunes to send a tweet with the song your listening to in three clicks. You can also easily share the page you’re viewing with others, and this is a feature I personally welcome more, since it saves me a lot of copy-paste time. If you have a blog but don’t like the Twitter Tools Wordpress extension (see below), you can easily let people know about your new posts with this little addon.

As a simple Twitter client it also has the ability to send normal tweets. You can choose between normal text and normal text+URL which will allow you to send a regular message, and add the URL you are currently on to it optionally. The URL does take away characters from your tweet though, so if you’re on a long URL, it may be difficult to get some proper text in there.

Twitter Tools for Wordpress

Twitter tools is a plugin for Wordpress made by Alex King, who has supplied us with lots of popular stuff before, like category overlord, popularity contest and so on (see the link). This won’t fail to impress either, it integrates elegantly and efficiently with Wordpress allowing you to use it in conjuction with your Twitter account.

Among its many features is the ability to create tweets out of your entries and entries out of your tweets. You can use it to automatically post the URL of your newest entry, but you can also use it to create entries from your tweets. This may sound a bit stupid, what are you going to do with 140 character long entries?

Well if you create a separate personal blog and record all your tweets, you may have a huge collection of tweets in no time. This means you can log everything you do, organize yourself with it, create a database of tasks you’ve done or want to do, the possibilities here are endless. You can use it to log all the music you’ve listened to by using it in tandem with the TwittyTunes Firefox addon, the rest is up to your imagination.

What is your favourite Twitter tool? You know by now where to write it! Plus if you want to follow the Make Use Of and its writers on Twitter, just go here to find their Twitter usernames.

(By) Daniel Pataki is the writer of Hack Your Day, his productivity blog and founder of Blogtastique, a blog management service. I feel like I’m leading three lives at once, I’m even too tired to continue using third person here!”

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New on MakeUseOf ? Get cheat sheets and cool PDF guides @ www.makeuseof.com/makeuseof-downloads/

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Trendrr allows you to track 20 different data sets from a number of popular sites around the web. You can track social networking stats like Myspace profile views or Twitter user stats, sales information like Amazon sales rankings and eBay auctions or maybe you just want to track various stock tickers. Currently there are 20 different data sources for you to choose from, with more being added as the site grows.

You’re also able to create custom data sets using either a RESTful API or inputting the data yourself by uploading a spreadsheet or using their web based interface. The API is great for developers who want to use Trendrr’s graphing capabilities. I’m not an expert on APIs so if any of you use it let us all know how it goes.

Each graph can be customized allowing you to have a line, area, area gradient, scatter or bar graph. The colors are customizable, as are the graph titles. Data can also be exported in an xml, json, or excel file.

In the upper right hand corner of your screen you have something called a “Trendrr scratchpad.”

This handy little space allows you to merge 2-3 different data sets for comparison. All you have to do is drag and drop the different data sets into this scratch pad. This particular user used the scratchpad to merge news story data for the top three U.S. Presidential Candidates.

Trendrr’s sharing ability is also pretty cool. You can view other user’s data sets, comment on them, embed the graphs on your blog or website, and vote on popular trends. Don’t worry, you can elect whether or not you want your data sets to be made public so you can keep your private data for your eyes’ only.

The site’s social networking elements are sparse but common. You’re able to friend others and blog on your very own Trendrr blog. RSS feeds are also available so you can keep up to date on your favorite user’s data sets.

Setting up your first dataset is simple. You just click on “Start Tracking” and away you go. My first data sets were from YouTube. I decided I was going to compare two of YouTube’s most viral videos, Tay Zonday’s “Chocolate Rain” video and the infamous Rick Roll video. I was curious to see if there was any correlation between their views per day. I encourage you to try something basic just to get a feel for things. Data can take up to 24 hours to populate.

Trendrr has the potential to be useful for everyone. Bands can track their Myspace data and see how it correlates to their latest blog mentions. Internet marketers can gain some insight into their social marketing efforts or keep an eye on their brands across the social networking landscape. An individual can easily satisfy their narcissistic needs by tracking themselves on all of their social accounts. The list could go on and on.

I have had fun perusing the trends of others and trying to think of different things to track but Trendrr isn’t just for fun. Give it a try and let us know how you were able to use its features for your business. It has tremendous potential.

Written by Renee Valdez, A dot com junkie, music lover and frequent blogger at Shopwiki’s Overlooked, a blog showcasing overlooked products from Shopwiki’s webcrawlers.

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• Google Trends : Buzz-Meter for Topics on the Web (3)
• Alexa – Web Discovery Tool (2)
• 6 Websites to Track A Website’s Traffic (41)
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Google is largest and most widely used search engine on the web with more then 2.5 billion searches conducted every month (more here). By selecting portion of this data and analyzing how many times ‘terms you entered’ have been searched relative to the total number of searches on Google over the days, it generates trends. These trends are based on the real searches conducted by people hence they show trends of community towards the topic. Remember recent buzz regarding US ports takeover? See the trend here

Best part of Google Trends is that it allows you to compare trends for multiple topics simultaneously. For instance, you can compare terms ’shorts’ and ’sweater‘, and from the graph you can easily see differences in the trends during winter and summer periods. Or here a trend comparing “Brad Pitt”,”Angelina Jolie” and “Jeniffer Aniston”. It seems that until the spike in the mid 2004, terms Brad Pitt and Jeniffer Aniston follow similar trend and same happens with Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie after the spike, in my opinion this spike occured at the same time when the rumors of Jeniffer and Brat splitting came out.

Some Google Trends Features:

• compare up to five terms by separating them with comma.
• an option to see how many searches contained either of the two terms, just separate those terms with a vertical bar: “|” (eg: ipod|nano) instead of comma.
• compare multi-word terms by surrounding them using brackets [ex: (winter mittens), gloves ]
  
• exclude terms from your trend using the minus sign (ex. if you want trend for bags but not gucchi made ones then use bags-gucchi)
• restrict your search to particular region or time frame, through drop down menu on the top right corner of the screen
• News-reference volume graph displays the number of times term appeared in the news.
• some points on the graphs have related news that have occured at that time.You can observe it usually on the spikes.
• view trens in different cities, regions and languages

Oh, keep in mind that Google trends is a part of Google Labs meaning that it is still under early stages of development and several changes are still to come. For more questions you can visit Google Trends – FAQ. There are some more trends for you here, ronaldinho, beckham, israel, lebanon or cat, dog, fish, bird. If you find some interesting trends drop it in the comment line, so we can check them out as well.

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• Alexa – Web Discovery Tool (2)
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Mostly Alexa used for quick checkup on popularity of a website. It provides users with such info as traffic details (rank of the website out of all active websites), incoming links(other websites linking to it), related links(related websites) and owner’s contact info. It can also be used to check on site’s credibility by looking at the number and relevance of incoming links and traffic rank. To get some idea check out alexa info on wikipedia.org here. The easiest way to benefit from this service, is by installing ‘Alexa Toolbar‘, which provides you with real-time info about websites as you visit them.

For firefox users there is ‘Search Status’ plugin that conveniently integrates alexa inside browser toolbar. See it in action below

Some interesting stuff from alexa:

Alexa – Movers and Shakers

Movers and Shakers section lists sites that have experienced significant changes in an average number of visitors over the last 2 weeks. Sites that make to the positive part of the list usually have something interesting to look at. Check out Mover and Shakers here.

Alexa – Top 500

This section provides you with a sorted list of 500 most visited sites according to alexa (see it here). There is also an option to view top visited sites by country,languages and category.

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