The user interface isn't nearly as nice as leading tech blog memetracker Techmeme, but the new Blogsearch has some major advantages.

We're in shock that Google Blogsearch has actually updated. It's cleaner and less spammy than Technorati, it's more transparent than Yahoo Buzz, it's more inclusive than Six Apart's new Blogs.com and to the big question will be whether it's faster than Techmeme. (Techmeme caught this story far faster than the new Google Blogsearch!) That's our concern as a tech site. This has to be entirely new for bloggers who write about television, video games or business. Those sectors have got to be excited.

The science blogosphere has Postgenomic, which is so full featured it probably won't lose any traffic at all to Google Blogsearch Science.

A Techmeme Killer?

Even in tech, though we may love Techmeme - it's audience is more influential than it is large. The new Google Blogsearch has the potential to reach tens of millions of people and drive insane amounts of traffic.

Techmeme indexes a limited number of tech blogs, primarily blogs linked-to by other blogs that are already indexed. Google Blogsearch, on the other hand, indexes all blog posts faster than anyone else on the web.

Techmeme is a great site and founder Gabe Rivera works hard to update its machinery and functionality regularly. The same iteration strategy can't be assumed for the new Google Blogsearch, in fact it appears that the Google News algorithm has just been applied to blogs. All this may or may not be significant. Rivera offered no response when we contacted him asking for one.

We're excited about the new Google Blogsearch. What do you think? Can you imagine yourself visiting it now?

Politweets, of course, has been providing a similar service for quite a while already, but its scope is limited to just filtering out tweets with the candidates' names in it. Twitter, on the other hand, uses a constantly changing set of keywords, which makes it far more dynamic.

The most compelling feature of Twitter's election site is actually quite simple: the automatically updating stream. That's one feature we have always missed on our regular Twitter homepages and also one of the most compelling reason to use a desktop client instead of Twitter's site.

The value of a service like this is often not so much in the content of a single tweet, but in the aggregation and real-time view of the discussion. Even Twitter's Summize-based search does not update automatically. We have started to use Monitter to track Twitter conversations when there is a breaking news story because it updates automatically.

In addition, as Josh Catone points out, Twitter sits on a goldmine of similar information that it is not putting to good use yet. Now that they have this infrastructure in place, Twitter could easily create similar sites for other events, or even allow its users to create their own Twitter-based memetrackers in the future.

The idea of using a tag cloud to track memes on Twitter is obviously not new, but having the tag cloud update dynamically makes for a whole new experience. While testing Twitscoop this morning, for example, the news about Carl Icahn's newest letter to Yahoo's shareholders was breaking on Twitter and made it onto Twitscoop's tag cloud within less than a minute.

Sometimes, the items on the tag cloud seem to appear more because of serendipity than because they are real memes. If five people write the 'dumb' or 'w00t' within 10 minutes of each other, for example, it will show up in the cloud, even though the tweets are not related at all.

If a tag cloud seems especially noteworthy, you can easily send a tweet with a permalink to the cloud. While this might only be useful in a very limited number of occasions, it is a nice feature to have nevertheless.

As of now, Twitscoop does not feature an API, nor does it have a widget for its live tag cloud that you could put on your blog or your desktop.

Search

Twitscoop is also a very capable Twitter search engine. While it is pretty basic, in that it doesn't feature live updates like Summize, or organize conversations like Quotably, it does show a nice graph of how often a search term has been used on Twitter in the last 6 to 72 hours (see screenshot). Just like on Summize, you can reply to a tweet from the search page and there is a link to the original tweet as well.

Twitscoop picks up new tweets very fast - most appear in under one minute.

Verdict

The ideal Twitter search engine would combine the live updates and API from Summize, the live tag cloud from Twitscoop, and the conversation tracking from Quotably. As of now, we still have to wait for this, but Twitscoop's live updates are definitely worth taking a closer look at and its search engine is a good alternative to Summize.

Polymeme is an ambitious project and it goes up against more established meme trackers like Tailrank, Megite, Techmeme and Memeorandum, as well as the broad range of social news sites like Digg, Newsvine, and Yahoo! Buzz.

Hybrid Model

Polymeme is a hybrid system. Its front page is determined by a group of editors who pick the most interesting stories to be featured on the site from the pool of popular stories in the blogosphere as determined by Polymeme's memetracker back-end. This memetracker is never fully exposed to users, but the 'Popular Memes' section is determined algorithmically.

Because Polymeme only has a limited pool of editors, it can take some time for a story to appear on the front page. As Evgeny pointed out to us, though, having editors look for stories that would otherwise stay off the radar is 'a feature, not a bug.' Also, Polymeme argues that while the tech blogosphere moves very fast, other blogging verticals move a lot slower. In general, the site refreshes every 2-3 hours.

In many respects, this approach does resemble a newspaper or journal more than a memetracker - but maybe that doesn't come as a surprise, given Evgeny's background as a journalist.

Features

While the site works very well without creating an account, logging into the site allows users to personalize the news selection and create personalized RSS feeds or email alerts. What Polymeme doesn't do is create a personalized feed based on keywords or on a user's OPML file like Megite does. For now, the personalization options stop at choosing topics from a menu of different sections of the site .

Polymeme's Buzz section is another interesting feature of the site. Buzz is basically a tag-cloud interface to Polymeme based on the tags automatically created by OpenCalais, and while it broke once or twice during testing, it does present an interesting way for browsing blogs.

Verdict

Where Polymeme really shines is in the selection of blogs it tracks, which is extremely wide and global in its scope. Looking at the articles featured on Polymeme today, there is very little overlap with those of other memetrackers.

Polymeme is an interesting experiment. The hybrid model of tracking memes but also employing editors might seem a bit strange at first, but so far, the editors have done a good job at highlighting interesting stories that did mostly fly under the radar of the traditional memetrackers.

Whether Polymeme can help us break out of the echo chamber (or whether it just creates a bigger echo chamber) remains to be seen - for now, it's an experiment worth taking a look at.

One way to describe ReadBurner is that it's adding value by and on top of aggregating explicit attention gestures. Below are some thoughts on ReadBurner and what it could do to be even cooler.

Opt-in as the way to do it

While Google Reader recently screwed the...well, dropped the ball, by pulling in Shared Items from your GMail contacts whether you liked it or not - ReadBurner is a good example of the kind of opt-in sharing that is much more consistent with user-centric leveraging of Attention Data. That's the polite way to say that most people will never find out about it. Just kidding.

Vendors need to learn that the era of lock-in is gone and much of the data-centric innovation of the future will probably need to be opt-in only. People have always believed that forcing others to do your bidding is the best way to get things done, but when power parity is approached - coercive steps like opt-out data sharing breaks a social contract that users are no longer tied to by necessity. We can leave and go somewhere else, so you have to get our permission to use our data.

That's probably overstating the situation - do Twitter users need to opt-in in order for API driven services like Twittertale (NSFW) or Twitterwhere to use their tweets? Hopefully not. This is a complicated question, but starting with opt-in seems like a good idea, generally. (I smell a forthcoming blog post on this question itself.)

Risks taken

Marktl seems intent on pushing the envelope with the application; his logo originally used the Google colors and now he's experimenting with running AdSense next to the content - including against the full feeds! That's something even Google hasn't dared to do yet. That move doesn't seem so wise to me given that it's the supposed tech savvy nature of Google Reader users that Marktl says make Google Reader shared item feeds particularly...tech savvy. Such users are widely believed to be the least likely to click on ads.

Marktl is adding submitted feeds manually but I've submitted my personal link blog from Ma.gnolia because Google Reader doesn't deal well with accounts subscribed to more than 1k feeds. I'd like to participate in ReadBurner too. If it's tech savvy users you're looking for Google Reader is not the be-all-end-all by a long shot.

Recommendations

ReadBurner is a great example of one of the cool things you can do with feeds. Here's some next steps I'd love to see from the app.

Recommended users. Let me sign up for an account with ReadBurner (using or tied to OpenID please) and recommend other users' feeds to me that have a lot of overlap with mine. Something like the recommendations at ShareYourOPML (site down) but dynamic so people will keep using it. I'd love to get a feed of newly recommended users too, and perhaps the ability to add recommended users' feeds to a spliced feed just for me.

Hot users. I'm guessing that ReadBurner could show me a LeaderBoard of the contributors who most often share items early that end up being hot later. I would subscribe to those peoples' feeds in a heartbeat. The site has some interesting stats now, specifically the most shared-from sources and authors, but a lot more is possible I'm sure.

It's exciting to think about. This is the kind of innovation that gets the mind spinning. I hope ReadBurner will continue developing, will see continued adoption and won't be shut down by Google. Goodness knows someone outside has to keep the pressure to innovate on Google Reader - remember how long it took GReader to add a search box? Google Reader is very good, but so much more can be done.