Davis Freeberg’s Digital Connection

One of the things that Economists love to follow are economic indicators. There are basically three forms of indicators that people use to help determine what is happening in the economy. Past, present and future. Each one plays an important role in helping Economists know what’s going to happen, what’s happening and what really happened in the economy.

Interestingly enough, I’ve found that the blogosphere also has it’s own unique set of indicators. Staying up to date on all the recent news may seem like a tough job, but by using various aggregators, it’s really not all that hard to track whats going on in the blog world.

As far as future indicators go, I’ve found Digg to be my best sources for breaking news. The blogosphere is large, it’s diverse and it’s sheer volume can make it impossible to track. Because it depends on citizen participation, you never know which post will be breaking news and which one will be another story about that damn Penguin movie.

Digg is great because people naturally submit their stories to the site and if it starts to get traction, then you know that you’ve got breaking news on your hands. If you want to know what the next scandal in the blogs will be, then all you have to do is go to Diggs upcoming stories and look for something taking off fast. Sure enough within 24 hours that story will be pretty hot. The problem with Digg though, is that because they reward breaking news over quality reporting, they get a lot of stories wrong.

For gettng a better snapshot of what’s currently happening in the blogs, I turn to Tech Memeorandum. Techmeme has great technology that can tell which stories are important by looking at the number of blogs that are linking to a particular source. Because it depends upon several bloggers to find something of interest, it’s not always going to be the first to a story, but because it leverages authoritative opinions, you get a better sanitized news filter both in terms of quality and accuracy.

When I look for trailing indicators, my first stop is Google news. By the time the mainstream media has picked up on a story you pretty much know that it’s important. Because journalists can dedicate greater resources to uncovering details, you also get a better picture of what’s really happened. In many ways Google news is very similar to Techmeme except that they only include the major press and there isn’t always a lot of variety from the coverage of one story to another, especially once the AP gets ahold of a story.

Overall, as a certified news junkie, I find all three of the sources to be an invaluable resource for tracking what goes on in the digital world. While each site serves a specific niche in how I use it, all of the sites still offer functionality beyond their core strength. Digg has a top stories tag that gives a nice snapshot of what stories were the hottest over the past week, Techmeme just launched a really cool new feature called, Techmeme river that keeps track of the past stories that hit it’s main page, and even in the case of Google news, it’s search feature is very good at finding breaking stories on specific topic, if you are actively looking for them. Despite the additonal functionality however, I’m glad that each site has it’s own unique strength that it brings to the blog world and by better understanding these strengths you can make better use of these tools to find the information that you are looking for.

Posted on December 11th, 2006 by Davis
Filed under: Search, Technology, Web 2.0