Trend Tracker

Category: Trend Tracker

Trend Tracker: Last.fm vs. Pandora

Tuesday, March 21st, 2006

A few weeks back we started tracking the blogosphere buzz on Last.fm and Pandora, two music recommendation sites. Now we’ve added them to our Trend Tracker page for all to enjoy!

In “Pandora and Last.fm: Nature vs. Nurture in Music Recommenders” Steve Krause posts a detailed comparison of the two and contends that Pandora has a greater potential. According to Steve, Pandora can more easily implement Last.fm features than the other way around.

We’ve been very impressed users of Last.fm and wouldn’t be surprised if they come out on top, if only because their site is beautiful, usable and has a sizable and visible community. Also, we use Last.fm’s features for artist discovery more than the streaming personalized radio station that seems to be the main focus of Pandora.

Anyway, check out the Trend Tracker and see a daily update on which site is getting more coverage in the blogosphere.

Flickr vs. YouTube

Monday, March 6th, 2006

YouTube is a service that launched in early 2005 and allows users to upload and share videos, much like Flickr.com does for photos.

It was covered by Techcrunch in August 2005 and subsequently Slashdotted.

We have only recently become aware of the service and since Techcrunch predicts that YouTube will get acquired and since the same happened for Flickr in 2005, we thought that tracking the two on the Trend Tracker might be interesting.

How much buzz will YouTube have generated before and if it gets acquired?

Social lending platforms Zopa and Prosper added to the Trend Tracker

Thursday, February 9th, 2006

We mentioned the social lending platform Zopa in a previous post (see: “Zopa: Disruptive technology par excellence“) as en example of an interesting and possibly disruptive technology.

Zopa operates in the UK and in early February it got an American counterpart: Prosper.com. We decided to add the two to our Trend Tracker to see how much buzz each one is getting in the blogosphere according to Google’s blog search engine. Currently, Zopa’s head start has them well in the lead.

Check out the buzz on Zopa vs. Prosper on the Trend Tracker. Zopa’s reaction to the newcomer in a post on its blog is also interesting.

Tracking the FireAnt trend

Thursday, February 2nd, 2006

When TechCrunch posted a link to the FireAnt web site, we expeted people to start blogging heavily about the site. To track this buzz, we set up the Trend Tracker, which monitors how many links to the site Google’s blogsearch finds at the end of each day.

Fireant trend tracker results

This image is only a snapshot, but the Trend Tracker has an image that is updated daily according to results from the Google blogsearch tool.

We might start tracking other trends for fun and suggestions are welcome via comments.

Update: Subscribe to the Trend Tracker RSS feed to see when we add new sites to the tracker.