BlogPulse Live Is....LIVE!

Just a few minutes ago, a new feature took up residence on the BlogPulse home page (upper-right corner), and it's called BlogPulse Live.

Powered by a behind-the-scenes tool we lovingly refer to as FloodGate, BlogPulse Live provides a real-time, minute-by-minute view of the most popular topics that bloggers are writing about. Each topical line represents a percentage of all blog posts as they're published (Eastern time). Click on the small chart on the home page for a larger view.

Here's how it works: BlogPulse Live captures new blog entries, and then text-mining and text-analysis technologies categorize the posts into key subject areas, such as "Diaries" (personal journals), "Politics," "Movies/TV," "Technology," "Sports," "Health," "Religion," "Meme," (online game/activity/quiz that's circulated by/among bloggers) "Food" and more.

BlogPulse Live will be especially useful when certain news events take place, and this weekend will provide a perfect example to put it to the test. Check back before, during and after the Super Bowl game on Sunday, for example, to see if "Sports" discussion muscles its way into the leading categories.

More blog innovation
Matthew Hurst, Intelliseek's Director of Research and a key member of the BlogPulse team, has been working on different visualization methods for capturing what's going on in the blogosphere. You can check out the work at Matt's Data Mining blog.