What’s the Buzz?

A couple of recent additions to the tools available for tracking user-generated content can help journalists make sense of the chatter clutter, Cyberjournalist.net’s Jonathan Dube suggests in the Web Tips section of poynter.org.

The first is Omgili, which scans millions of online discussions on more than 100,000 message boards and forums. Each search page also offers an online buzz graph showing how many posts were made daily for the past month. There’s also Omgili Buzz, which gives a daily overview of the most popular discussion topics in areas such as videos, movies, news, games, DVDs and books; and Omgili Graphs, which lets you compare the amount of buzz on topics of your choice. These can then be embedded on your site.

The second is popurls.com, which taps into the increasing popularity of sites that let users submit, save and vote for Web pages they find online. The site lists the top stories and Web pages that have been highlighted by users on a range of social bookmarking and citizen media sites, including digg.com, del.icio.us, newsvine.com, fark.com and more. Top headlines from Google News, Wired News and other sites also are provided.

More Web Tips are available at: poynter.org/column.asp?id=32