BuzzFeed

I give a thumbs up to BuzzFeed.  It's a part man, part machine tracker of word-of-mouth buzz through blogs.  It's a interesting hybrid because it's not just tracking searches, like Yahoo!, Google and Technorati.  And it uses editors to sift through the garbage.  The simplicity of the design and lack of superfluous nonesense is a real plus too.  Total dedication to the cause. 

Nice touch on the interior pages with the "drop us a line if you've written about this topic"  Encourages people to sound off on buzzing topics, which adds to the sample size.  I'll be RSSing this and see how much I care for their version of buzziness.   

Some improvements to think about once the site gets going:

1. Geo-targeted displays.  I want to know the national buzz, but also the buzz in New York.
2. More visual tools to see how the memes compare to each other in real time.  I could see getting addicted to refreshing a graph that pits the memes tracked on the home page against each other

If this intends to be a profitable business, which I don't know is the case, they must want to either sell ads or sell the data to businesses.  There are a number of specialized blog buzz tracking services, but this might have a leg up because of the management.  The founders of BuzzFeed know blogs.  Notice that the illustrious Jason Kottke and Jonah Peretti are part of the crew. (They list they online buzzworthiness projects on the right column of BuzzFeed homepage.) 

I'm going to add the BuzzFeed badge to my blog page.  This will hopefully make up for all the things I can't read online anymore because business school gets in the way.

I'll be watching. (Thanks, Andrea)

Comments

[Nickie]

I love Buzzfeed. It won't take time before it overtakes Digg.

[Marketing Dissertation]

Blogs are so informative where we get lots of information on any topic. Nice job keep it up!!