Sunday, March 27, 2005
Tracking Blog Conversations with Blogpulse
As usual, Steve Rubel has the neatest tricks for bloggers. 
His latest post shows you how you can track the spread of a meme through the blogosphere using a tool from Blogpulse.
Using the Conversation Tracker, you can enter in any blog post URL and get a snapshot for how the meme is spreading through the blogosphere.
Blogpulse explains it this way:
When a blogger publishes a post and other bloggers link to it, the post becomes part of a conversation. The initial post is the "seed" of the conversation.
Posts linking to the seed are themselves linked to, and so on. From the seed post grows a conversation graph. The nodes of the graph are posts and the arcs of the graph are permalink citations from post to post.
The BlogPulse Conversation Tracker creates a threaded view of the conversation graph. To create a threaded view, it performs a depth-first traversal of the conversation graph, starting from the seed post and visiting each node only once.
This tool might not be a comprehensive way to track how your posts are being picked up. For instance it showed only one link for my last post on blog burnout, and failed to list trackbacks from other blogs that picked up my article.
But it can prove might useful when you have to get a quick assessment of how many blogs are citing your post.
