Google Trends: For Recreational Use Only

I was catching up on my feed reading and noticed posts on Techcrunch and Micropersuasion about Google’s new buzz tracking product, Google Trends. According to Google:

“Google Trends analyzes a portion of Google web searches to compute how many searches have been done for the terms you enter relative to the total number of searches done on Google over time....

ImpactWatch Wins the 2006 Iron Sabre

We’ve mentioned our media management and analysis platform, ImpactWatch, several times (in passing) on this blog. Last night, at the 2006 Sabre Awards Dinner in Manhattan, we learned that we had won the Iron Sabre for the Research/Evaluation category, beating out Hill & Knowlton’s Wal-Mart Media Day Analysis case study....

Participatory Podcasts: A New Tool for Political Campaigns?

Gary wrote an entry a few months ago about politicians holding town hall meetings with voters over the telephone. A promising new podcast service called Waxxi takes this concept even further, combining podcasting with the kind of group conference call services Gary wrote about.

The problem with podcasts is that they typically don’t offer opportunities for group participation or interaction....

Cruising the Sphere

A colleague of mine pointed me towards Sphere; a fast, new blog search engine. The interface is simple and uncluttered, making it easy to perform searches and track trends. After entering a search term and selecting “custom range” from the first drop-down, a graph of mentions appears just above the results....

Internet Explorer 7 is a Step in the Right Direction

I just downloaded the beta version of Microsoft’s new version of Internet Explorer. Here are a couple of quick thoughts on it:

(1) This is a very RSS friendly browser, and will go a long way towards getting non-geeks to use the technology. IE 7 has a little RSS icon (shown on left) that is highlighted when you are browsing a site that has an RSS feed associated with it....