Hi, there are several resources providing trending topics: twitter search, google trends, yahoo buzz, and web2express digest. Because they use different algorithms on different contents, it may not be fair to make direct comparison. But, just looking at the outcomes, it's helpful to know how they differ.
Twitter provides only top 10 trending topics from tweets. It feels like a teaser to me. Maybe more comprehensive list will come out in the future. Web2express digest gives out all identified topics from twitter stream in real time (thanks to twitter API). To answer different questions from different user groups, it present fresh topics in several ways. You can see new topics just emerging today, or daily new topics for the last few days, or even all of today's topics (including not-so-exciting ones). The topics are sorted by scores by default, but you can also sort the topics by time to spot latest topics. Google trends are based on user search queries and/or web page index. It provides top 100 topics. It seems to me that it requires lots of contents being generated before topics can be calculated. for example, there is no index-based trend lines for many twitter topics because of not enough relevant data in the index. Yahoo buzz are based on user search queries and maybe buzzup contents. there are several categories of buzz as well as overall leaders. I'm just starting to look at these differences, but my immediate feeling is that they are quite complementary to each other. Combining all of them on one web page would give user a better view than individual source could. this is the new page I added earlier today to web2express digest web site<http://web2express.org>. For each topic, I included links to search the various sources. from the page, I find it very easy to figure out what a wired twitter topic is about by clicking the links to twitter search, google search and google trend. cheers, -aj -- AJ Chen, PhD Co-Chair, Semantic Web SIG, sdforum.org http://web2express.org Palo Alto, CA
