Alex Pooley's Blog

You can track what people are saying about your brand, or your competition’s brand from your feed reader. Simply go to Technorati, type in what you want to track, and then subscribe to the results.

After finding blog articles, you can interact with the blog community through comments. I’m quite sure this is how Mike Levin of HitTail was able to leave his monkey comment on my article about website analytics software shortly after I published the article.

You can also do the same thing from Google Blog Search.

Below is a chart of five web 2.0 relates sites, namely digg, delicious, flickr, techcrunch, and technorati, all finding huge growth in April 2006. What the heck happened in April 2006 to spike all these sites? Was it a natural phenomenon, maybe a conference, some complex symbiotic relationship, holidays, change in weather, or did Alexa begin to bias these sites?

(click image for a larger chart)

There’s also a common trend of losing traffic towards the end of the year. You can see the end of each plot is in decline, and the same occurred in 2005. If you took a trader’s technical analysis mind set, you might say that each site spiked at the end of the third quarter and is only falling back to it’s trend line.

The resemblance between the traffic charts of technorati and del.icio.us is unbelievable.