How to find out what is hot/talked about/popular on the web?

Digg is a very popular service. It lets you post a news that will get ranked and published according to the number of “votes” digg readers will give. Another way to give power to internet users and find out easily what is really interesting out of the jungle in the web.

Like all many successful ideas Digg has many sisters and brothers all over the world. Shoutwire, Commontimes, Threadwatch, Slashdot. This is for english speaking users. But you have also Tapemoi, Scoopeo and Fuzz for French, Meneame for Spanish and it is just a question of time before we see before our eyes a russian version as well as a german version.

I have thought a little bit about that system. I believe it has strong limits due to its own “rating” and category system. Indeed Digg and others can be used by webmasters to promote their own website/blog. Which can be great as i experienced myself, but can give a biased view of the reality of the web as news submited (even if relevant and popular) does not reflect the TRUE popularity of what is talked about in the web and in particular in blogs.

Another limit. The category system. Digg is very much technology news oriented and others too. Categories are fixed and does not let users submit specific or multiple categories either (eg: culture / books). I also realized that on some systems you can vote without registering (tapemoi for example) and therefore it will enable you to vote several times for the same post from different computers or by cancelling cookies. And even in case of registration you can easily build a network of clickers with your friends…

That s when i discovered BlogsNow. Behind a very basic and “empty” design, there is a very simple and powerful service that basically scans more than 22 millions blogs every 60 seconds and that ranks the 20 most refered URLS mentionned in the blogs. No voting system, just a pure URL indexing system. If Digg works on a directory mode, blogsnow works on a search engine mode. And i would blogsnow more “objectivity”. Interesting to compare at a given time difference of ranking between both systems.

It gives you at any given time the most used URLs and of course the list of blogs mentionning it. Another way to get a true view of what is talked about in the blogosphere. 4 limits :

no RSS for this service

no categories (for now)

a limit to 20 most refered URLS.

limit to blogs scanning

However i am ready to bet on further improvements and success of this service as well as copycats to come.

[update 06/01] thanks for all your emails and comments. I was since this post pointed to Scoopeo, another digg-like, i included above and also to reddit which has a a very interesting approach. This self-funded company offers another option . The personnal filter: it will learn what you like and will recommend links that you like. Interesting also the top menu with easy access to hot (most buzzed), new (most recent), top (most voted) and recommended links). Good luck to them.

PS: you can also of course use Technorati “most search” words to have a view of what s going on. But it only refers to search activity and is updated every hour. You can also use Blogpulse trends which gives graphs by trend topics, but is is more MACRO than MICRO approach.