Breakdown of Media Content vs Blog Content

Posted: November 7, 2005

Topix.net, one of my favorite news sources, is beginning to include blogs in it’s news coverage. While alone, this might not be considered huge news on the heels of Yahoo doing something similar, their research is fantastic.

Topix did a breakdown of traditional media topics vs blog topics and show the results here in a few different graphs.

Looking at the graph, it could be interpreted in several ways. If you’re a webmaster, you can see there are areas that blogs are not covering nearly as close as traditional media, and assuming traditional media is more a standard of user interest, it’ll let you see areas where a good blog can really shine due to lack of competition.

Or, it could be interpreted as this is what people are highly interested in, as it’s what they are writing about - and give the traditional media a wake up into the subjects they should be allocating resources to cover.

For those who enjoy reading through RSS, but can’t find good RSS feeds for various topics - topix.net is the place to go. My favorite thing about this is you can subscribe to an RSS feed with a search query, instead of by channel.

Here is the XML feed for topix on the query Search Engine News: http://rss.topix.net/search/?q=search+engine+news&xml=1

You can change the query string ?q=search+engine+news&xml=1 to be anything you desire. This makes it so you can have very specific feeds.

Personally, I run about 30 topic RSS queries into a single Attensa folder. I might not have news everyday with these specific queries, but when that folder has something in it, it’ll be exactly what I’m looking for.

With an overwhelming amount of news being published on the web everyday, one needs a pre-filtering technique to not be overwhelmed, my solution has been to use Topix.net RSS Search. If you have another good pre-filtering technique, please let me know.

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