Last week’s topics focused on tech trend discovery. In this post I will highlight a few sites that can help in the process. Nothing I have previewed provided a silver bullet in terms of being able to automatically identify up-and-comers (at least, not to my satisfaction), but all can be useful in providing a better understanding of hot technology topics, words and phrases, and can help in exercises related to product positioning, for example.
BlogPulse
BlogPulse (inactive) let’s you graphically chart occurrences of search terms and compare the popularity of various labels. This can help when you are comparing and contrasting differentword combinations.
You can vary the time horizon and compare up to three terms at once. It makes for a spiffy chart for your presentations, as you can adjust labels for the terms and other aspects of the appearance of the graph. The graph is interactive – you can drill down on a peak to view the related stories, and thus see for example if a spike in the occurrence of a term corresponds to related news of the day.
The downside is that it does not automatically identify terms that are rising importance; you need to specify search terms.
Google Insights for Search
Launched earlier this year, Google Insights for Search builds on the earlier work of Google Trends. It lets you pick from a predefined list of search categories and compare terms that you specify within these categories based on time horizon or geography. If you don’t specify search words it will show you the most popular searches within the category, and those that are rising in importance relative to others.
I gave it a try using some of the search terms from my previous post, and also generally looked at the area of enterprise tech, to see if the ones rising in importance bore any resemblance to the human-picked top trends (see Dueling Tech Predictions).
As you may recall, the example I cited in my last post was solid state storage – a category that many industry watchers feel has legs because falling chip prices and rising storage capacities are making it increasingly practical to use SSDs in place of traditional disk drives and thus take advantage of faster performance.
I decided to start out generally; I picked the category of Storage to see if SSD would make the list. Although the Top Searches in the left column below make sense, the rising searches do not appear to me to match terms that I know are increasingly being buzzed about in storage (with the exception of iSCSI SAN).
Looking at Enterprise Technology below, again the Top Searches column seems to make sense and map to familiar terms, but in Rising Searches as you can see below I got what would appear to be spurious search terms like “Toad for Oracle”
Finally, in the Storage category I entered three terms that I know are popular: deduplication, iSCSI and SSD to compare them.
You see the terms charted on a graph, almost like BlogPulse, and can also cycle through them one at a time to see the regional breakouts for each, and also related search terms. You can also get a graph of these terms compared with the baseline category search term, Storage in this case.
Additional Sites
I looked in vain to see if technology prediction markets can help. As I previously blogged, prediction markets tap into the wisdom of crowds and let people place bets on certain outcomes, like technologies that will break through. There are some sites that do this, but none seem to go wide and deep into tech (Yahoo had a technology futures market at one time but they discontinued the effort).
It seems to me that Wikipedia is the most logical place to chart emerging technologies and trends. Many people come here first to better understand new things. A buzz index of rising Wikipedia search terms would be extremely helpful. And a listing of newly added entries could provide help here as well. As reported on Read/Write Web, the WikiRage search engine can give some insight into Wikipedia trends by showing editing activity.
Finally, it seemed to me that social news sites like Digg and TechMeme might be good places to look to spot trends. Of course, there is the TechMeme leaderboard, which I have blogged about. This reports on the sources most frequently posted to TechMeme.
Digg Labs has some tools that are absolutely mesmerizing. They show buzz happening in real time, and displays rising chatter on topics via some pretty cool, animated visual effects.
