Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism unveiled a new index yesterday that traces blogs and social networking sites. To be honest, it doesn’t say a whole lot that we don’t already know.

The New Media Index’s first report states “From the preparations to the swearing-in to the music, President Barack Obama’s inauguration was by far and away the dominant subject debated and dissected by bloggers, user news sites and other social media last week.” The index reported that close to 63 percent of links embedded in social media sites related to the inauguration. Big surprise. The report also said that commentary was very passionate and ran the “ideological gamut.” Also, not earth-shattering news and confirms what everyone already knows-people tend to be more politically feisty on blogs and social media sites.

What is interesting is that main stream media dropped its focus on the inauguration after Tuesday and concentrated on news surrounding President Obama’s policy agenda and cabinet appointees. Does this suggest that inauguration coverage provided by blogs was generally more insightful and attentive than the main stream media’s coverage? Or simply that blogs tend to chew their stories longer than the traditional press? Pew’s index doesn’t really give any indication one way or the other.

PEJ has been searching tirelessly to find a way to monitor the blogosphere, like it does for main stream media. Their solution uses Technorati and IceRocket to track and index more than 100 million blogs and social media sites. PEJ then captures the top daily linked-to stories and analyzes their content. The Project also tracks the most popular news videos on YouTube each week. In another astonishing twist, C-SPAN’s broadcast of the inauguration topped the list.

Judging from the content of this week’s index and other indexes Pew has released, I would not expect a whole lot of surprises from the New Media Index.

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And there are many competitors. The Comscore chart below shows the relative traffic of the major ones – Technorati, Google Blog Search, Ask Blog Search, Sphere and IceRocket. Feedster is gone, although there are additional smaller engines like Zuula and Blogdigger as well. Every one of those companies is U.S. based (note that Paris-based Wikio has blog search as well as a Digg-like service).

Now Europe will have it’s own blog search engine – Twingly. I met Martin Källström, the company’s CEO, at the DLD conference in Munich earlier this week. Their focus, he says, will be to have a spam-free engine (something none of the others can claim) at the cost of inclusiveness. And at least at first, the engine will be focused on European blogs. Twingly’s search engine hasn’t launched yet, although I do have a screen shot of what the home page will eventually look like:

Twingly already has a product – a nifty screen saver that shows blog posts on a world map as they are written. The new search engine will use some of the back end technology they’ve developed for the screen saver – mainly their ping server (see here for our overview of what ping servers are) and existing index of blogs.

The search engine will be different from others, Källström says, in that it will be almost 100% spam free. How are they doing that? Instead of trying to index every blog in existence and then removing spam via black lists and other methods, they are limiting the blogs they monitor to those that are proven to be legitimate. They started with a small list of known blogs, and then spidered out from there based on links to other blogs. The assumption, which is fairly sound, is that good/real blogs will not link to spam blogs. The end result is a white list of real blogs that are indexed – everything else is ignored.

Källström says that, in addition to the consumer-facing search engine, they’ll partner with large content news sites to show blog posts related to news content. This is something both Sphere and Technorati have had success with in the past, and the company can do revenue-sharing deals on additional page views. Content providers like it because it incentivizes blogs to link to their content (to get a link back). Twingly may not be able to compete with Sphere and Technorati in getting U.S. based partners, but he says he already has some deals with large European publishers completed.

The company has raised €1 million in a July 2007 round of financing from Servisen. They have seven employees. Look for a launch of their search engine in the next month or two.

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What’s New?

IceRocket released their Link Tracker tool for website owners. There are a couple of fairly simple integration options.

This tool will insert a link at the bottom of each of your posts. The link will be to an IceRocket page that shows all posts and websites linking to your post’s URI. Along with comments, trackbacks and pingbacks, this is a nice way for blogs to keep a conversation going. Very nifty.

Additional Links:

SolutionWatch, Kevin Burton, Blog Herald, PinoyTopBlogsProject, Tris Hussey, RSSKitty, BasicThinking, Technoogle

Previous Profile: July 29, 2005

What’s New?

We wrote in our previous profile on IceRocket that they were changing their name to BlogScour (based on something Mark Cuban said at AlwaysOn).

Blake Rhodes, IceRocket’s CEO, called to tell me that our facts were not quite right (he also thanked us for the post). They are not going to change their name to BlogScour, but they are going to launch a site called BlogScour that will contain all of their blog search capabilities.

I saw this at Blogherald a few minutes ago (I cannot locate the mentioned SEW article), and emailed Blake to confirm the facts. He confirmed what he told me on Friday -

“Mike-

Blake”

So there you have it.

Personally, I don’t give a damn, I just love their search engine. They could call it searchcrap.com and we’d still use it twenty times a day to research companies.

Tags: icerocket, search, blogscour, techcrunch, web2.0, blogsearch, rsssearch, rss

Location: Dallas, Texas

What is it?

IceRocket is a blog search engine, and a damn good one, owned by Mark Cuban. In our opinion they aren’t quite ready to take on the king of blog search yet, but they are feature rich and doing some things very, very well.

There are two ways that people are comparing blog search engines today: total links for a given keyword or tag, and total links shown for a given blog. On both tests, IceRocket seems to be doing well (but not always). On the links into TechCrunch, IceRocket seems to be far and away the most up-to-date, this week (things change rapidly in the real-time-web).

IceRocket has a ton of great search and other tools, including search by keywords, tags (see their tag cloud here) and URLs.

They also have a trends service (see pre-defined trend competitions here), and hell, they even have email (when I was COO of GNR in London I sold one of our companies, NamePlanet, to NetIdentity, another Mark Cuban company which powers this). Finally, they also have a toolbar, which is awesome if you aren’t like me and still have enough browser real estate left to actually view web pages.

Basically, IceRocket is awesome. One area where they really shine is in search results. A result includes tons of useful links. In addition to a link to the source, there are also links to tags for the result, the blog itself, tools to refine the search to include or exclude that blog, number of links to the blog (for relevance and ego), and they even link to the RSS feed for the blog. All search results pages have RSS feeds.

Another fun tool is IceSpy, which shows a rolling list of incoming search terms (all linked). This reminds me of the flat screen in Google’s offices that shows incoming searches (although Google appears to filter out adult terms while IceRocket happily does not ).

They are changing their blog search engine name to BlogScour sometime in the near future.

We’ve also seen an increasing trend by bloggers to tag their posts with IceRocket tags in addition to Technorati Tags.

Additional Screen Shots:

Team:

Blake Rhodes, CEO

Additional Links:

SomewhatFrank, Mark Cuban, Blogebrity, Tris Hussey, Tris Hussey #2, Mark Cuban #2, PostMoneyValue, Mark Evans, BennelliBrothers, I, Peculiar, Somewhat Frank #2, RSSBlog, pogenwurst, Austin Pauls, Steve Rubel, TheBigPicture, Net, Technoogle, Josheph Scott, MostlyMuppet, Freshblog

IceRocket Tags: icerocket, blogscour, markcuban, feedster, technorati, blogpulse, bloglines, google, tagcloud, tags, tagging, search, blogsearch, web2.0