Web Buzz Explorer: The Social Media and Web 2.0 Buzz Hub

A window on the buzzscape surrounding social media - from brilliant blogs to viral videos, it's a hub for the hype.

You can use the categorized list of tools and services to scour online news, track personal projects, watch trends and discover new media. The sources are especially useful for exploring the most recent and most popular emergent data on social networks.

Videos

Throughout the Hub you'll find a selection of informative and entertaining videos that provide support and contextual insight for each topic.

DIY Social Applications

If you want to create your own social applications there's a selection of links to get you started in the Zeitgeist Toolbox at the bottom of the hub.

Common Connections and Hub Focus (Wikipedia Linkage):

• Buzz Aggregation
• Collaborative Filtering
• Coolhunting
• Collaborative Intelligence
• Collective Intelligence
• Crowdsourcing
• List of Internet Phenomena
• List of Social Networking Websites
• Memetracking
• New Media Marketing
• The Long Tail
• Web Zeitgeist

This is a living hub that aims to connect people with the cream of information floating to the top of social networks and news sources. Many of the sites harness the wisdom of crowds and display the results in easy to digest formats such as singlegators and news rivers. The list is constantly being refined for improved power browsing and data mining resources.

You're welcome to share related sites and projects in the comments area.

You can also share this list and build upon it under the terms of this Creative Commons license, attributing David Holmes as the author and this Hubpage as the source.

See DISS for my soundblog and other new media resources.

Further Research

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence - This important resource provides tools, information and media concerning the development of social networks and related fields. CCI's basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that-collectively-they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?'

CCI's Handbook of Collective Intelligence is an open wiki that provides a survey of the field of collective intelligence. The work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

News and resources for Apple products and Mac users.

• Apple/Mac News - Aggregated news about Apple (singlegator).

• i use this - A democratic way to rate applications by counting the number of users to define the value of an app. Useful for organizing, discovering and updating software.

• Macitt - A digg style community for the Apple web.

• MacScour - Scouring the Web for Apple news and Mac software updates (singlegator).

• Weblogs Inc Network - View all recent blog posts tagged Apple.

Popular blogs, timely posts, and vanity tracking tools.

• BlogShares - A fun fantasy blog share market.

• CNET Blog 100 - News.com's hand picked list of top blogs. Launch Grazr View to browse all.

• Hot Links - Blog aggregation and link database updated hourly.

• Metafilter - A community weblog with views for the most recent and most popular posts.

• Technorati Popular - A zeitgeist for the blogosphere revealing the hottest social media and blog posts. Here are the Top Tags, sized according to popularity.

• Technorati Mini - Launch multiple real-time search windows. Enter a search term or the URL of a page to monitor updated blogs.

• Top 500 Folders in Bloglines - Find the most popular topics and relevant feeds.

• The Truth Laid Bear Blogging Ecosystem - A list of weblogs ranked by the number of incoming links they receive from other weblogs on the list.
• Twitscoop - A buzz-cloud of what's hot on Twitter right now.
• TwitterBuzz - Shows you the most popular links on the microblogging service Twitter.
• TwitterSweet Music Search - A Google Custom Search Engine for finding music stuff.
• Twitt(url)y - Real-time link tracking on Twitter.

Ping Watching - WARNING - these sites may contain links to adult content.

• Autopinger recent blogs - A list of ping updates with individual RSS feeds.

• Pingoat - View recently updated blogs using this popular ping notification service.

• Syndic8 - 200 most recently pinged feeds.

• Weblogs.com - A real time view of recently updated weblogs.

Shared bookmarks and popular links in the blogosphere.

• Daily Mashup - Popular photos, bookmarks and news.

• Fark - A user submitted link-log with a humorous and satirical bias.

• FeedDigest Zeitgeist - Most linked to and popular Web pages on an hourly basis.

• Linkfilter - Fresh links posted & moderated by users.

• LiveMarks - Real time live preview of latest and popular del.icio.us bookmarks.

• memepool - A collaborative link-log with interesting and frivalous finds.

• Memestreams - A social web surfing tool that helps communities of people work together to find interesting content on the Internet.

• Oishii - del.icio.us mini-zeitgeist.
• Plime - A pliable tree of interesting links, cultivated and pruned by everyone.

• PopCurrent - Community critics vote and promote music, videos, podcasts, images and books.

• Populicio.us - Most popular del.icio.us sites of all time.

• Reddit - User driven source for what's new and popular online.

• Remixlinks - D.I.Y. mash-up indie cultures.

• Sanjeev.NET - Top 1000 bookmarked & blogged links (updated continuously throughout the day).

• SpinSpy - Bookmarked news stories with community ranking and political bias rating.
• StumbleUpon Buzz- Uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers have recommended.

• Urban.log - Open message board for interesting links.

• Web Feeds - Highest rated shared bookmarks.

Track news sites, blogs, conversations and feeds for emerging topics, trends and popular media.

• Blogniscient - Categorizes and ranks blogs and blog articles in real time.

• Blogpulse - An automated trend discovery system for blogs. Provides blog search, buzz-tracking and analysis tools.

• BlogsNow - A realtime memetracker showing the most linked to weblogs and popular topics.

• BuzzFeed - Buzz detection, editorial commentary and tracking that helps you find the sites with the most interesting stories in a range of topics.

• Buzztracker - Gives a visual representation of news on the net using a global map and Google data.

• Chuquet - Buzz browser that regularly scans over a thousand feeds - including stacks of Top 100 feeds.

• Cloudee - An automatic aggregator that tracks the daily headlines for hot technology and web oriented topics.

• Megite - Croudsourcing and memetracking. View river of news.

• Netscape.com - A social news portal programmed by the audience. A ranking algorithm is used to promote the most popular stories.

• Pmeme - A memetracker for people in the blogoshere.

• Popdex - Crawls over 14,000 sites daily to determine the most popular links.

• Talk Digger - Find and track Web conversations - see who's linking to you.

• Techmeme - Uncovers the most relevant items from thousands of news sites and weblogs.

• Web 2.0 announcer - A social news aggregator that provides a list of the most current and talked about stories.

• What's Making Blog News? - Provides ranked lists of new and popular stories.

• Woblog - A collective-intelligence social tool designed to rescue the best stories from blogs.

A selection of tools for tracking stories and trends on Digg.com.

• Digg Labs - Innovations and new ways of viewing information on Digg including Stack and Swarm.

• Digg Mobile - A version by MoBits.com.

• Digg Original Signal - Overview of popular headlines including: Rearrange Digg categories, Digg RSS feed, Digg Widget, Page Statistics.

• Digg River - News stream for mobile browsers, all the available feed categories are here.

• Digg Spy - Real-time view of recently dug stories.

• Digg Top Stories - Today, this week, last week, this year.

• DuggTrends - provides analysis and insight of what and how people are voting. The feeds are being used at Digg Trends on FeedRaider, a singlegator that shows what's up and coming, what almost made it to the mainpage and buried news.

See also Digg style applications in Web 2.0 below.

Various single page aggregators that display the most popular recent news from influencial blogs and online communities.

• Diggdot.us - digg, slashdot, del.icio.us popular.

• Don't Meet Your Heroes - A compilation of CSS and Web Standards resources.

• Feedorama - Single-page feed aggregators in a choice of channels (Spanish language).

• FeedRaider - Text/video/audio/photos aggregation in various topics with the ability to create your own singlegators.

• Mashfot - A mashup about photography showing the latest news, photos and popular links.

• Nowsy - A customizable news and info dashboard.

• PopDeal - A hub for the latest and most popular deals from around the the web (newsriver).

• PopFeedo - Displays Digg, Del.icio.us, Wired Technology, Reddit, Slashdot, and Yahoo Top News.

• Popfeeds - Popular feeds aggregation portal.

• Popurls - Aggregates the latest web buzz from more than 20 popular sites. Popurls Mobile

• Qoogle News - Japanese singlegator with a mix of popular photos, bookmarks and news sites.

• SpeedyFeed Popular - Social syndication portal and create your own single page aggregator.

• ViralBabble - Best of del.icio.us, Digg, Lifehacker, YouTube, Fark, Slashdot, iFilm, Gizmodo, Furl, Reddit with archives.

• VirtualReview: China - Gathers news and opinion about China.

• THEWEBLIST.net - Aggregated feeds portal for popular news and links.

• xmlhttprequest - Links and news about the best of ajax, Web 2.0, javascript, css, api, etc.

See also Web 2.0 below for more classic singlegators.

Computer video games news and developments.

• Digg River Gaming - News and links from the digg community, designed for mobile web browsers. See also Digg River above.

• Gaming News - New in computer and video games (singlegator).

• WiiNintendo - Nintendo Wii aggregated news feeds (singlegator).

Information gathering resources and tools for sharing ideas.

• Bright Ideas - Brilliant Minds - A collaborative list sharing project focusing on creativity, intelligence and problem solving. The aim is to collectively compile and distribute ranked lists of resources that help provide insight on how imagination and intelligent thinking transform the world we live in. Uses widgets and RSS feeds to distribute data.

• Data360 - A collaborative website built to help people find, present and share data.

• Global : Ideas : Bank - Contains thousands of ideas from every corner of the globe, filtered by recent and popular for quick browsing.

• Intelligence Tools Squidoo Lens - Provides links to a wide variety of databases, software and other information for gathering intelligence.

• Swivel - Allows you to explore all kinds of public data and share ideas.

Books, catalogs, databases, lists and information mining resources.

• LibraryThing Users - Social book cataloging zeitgeist.

• Listible - Shared lists of resources for all kinds of topics and purposes combined with tagging and voting for greater relevancy.

• ResearchBuzz - Provides news about search engines, databases, and other information collections.

• ResourceShelf - Useful resources and news for information professionals.

• Squidoo Top 100 Lenses - Explore the knowledge community and user curated lists (Plexodex) for all kinds of topics.

• Squirl - Lets you catalog, organize and share your interests as public collections.

• The Shifted Librarian - A library weblog focusing on cool tools and the shift in information distribution.

Sites for new music discovery, free MP3 audio downloads, music news aggregation, playlists, audio products, worldwide charts and data analysis.

• Best MySpace Band - A community where members promote bands found on MySpace.

• Blentwell - DJ mixset link collective & zeitgeist.

• Britney - A community where people recommend, rate and promote Open Music links.

• ccMixter News Aggregator - Open music news from friends of ccMixter focusing on Creative Commons music plus all the remixable audio files from community artists and DJs.

• Dave's FeedRaider - My own singlegators for CC Music, free MP3 downloads, open media resources, podcasts, and other news categories. Here's my Speedyfeed Free MP3 Portal and here's my audio and music related Grazr Browser.

• eBay Want It Now - Latest music items wanted to buy.

• Every instrument on Amazon - Coverpop's visual zeitgeist of product information.

• Google Music Trends - What music Google Talk users are listening to.

• HubLog - A Top mp3 blogs list.

• Hype Machine Top MP3 Blogs - a list of all the blogs listed on the Hype Machine sorted by the number of incoming links. Use the links at the top of the page to listen to music.

• The Best Albums of 2006 - A Squidoo lens created by me where people can share and vote for their favourite music. The list of Best Albums can be shared on any website using the widget and RSS tools.

• Starfrosch - A user driven mp3 blog with podcasts where people submit/rate music and videos which are compiled into social charts (weekly, monthly, yearly).

• Webjay - A playlist community with browsing options for both popular and recent playlists.

• Weblogs Inc Music Tag - All the latest music blog posts across the network.

Internet Data Analysis and Worldwide Music Charts

• Akamai: Global Music -Web Traffic Metrics - Daily Web traffic benchmark that tracks where and when digital music is being consumed on a global basis.

• BigChampagne - Online media measurement and charts for popular entertainment types.

• Charts All Over the World - Provides search and links to music charts.

• Gracenote Digital Top 10 - The most played albums on the Internet, aggregated from over 30 million listeners worldwide.

• Last.fm Charts - Shows how many people on Last.fm listened to something in a given week. Here are the Creative Commons Tag Charts.

• Yes - The 100 most popular songs as voted by the audience of the nation's top 2,600 Radio and virtually all Music TV Stations (U.S.). The data feed is provided by Mediaguide.

Media Search Engines

• Creative Commons Search - Provides multiple engines for searching main Open Media hubs with the option to filter searches by desired source, media type, and Creative Commons license. Use it to find free music, videos, images, and other media.

• Open Music Search - This Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) penetrates straight to the heart of the Open Music Ecosystem. Indexing more than 150 hand-picked resources with advanced filtering of media pools. Use it to find free music, sound samples, open source software, people, and other copyleft media services.

See also Web Traffic, Search Trends & Internet Marketing below.

People powered news communities, news tracking services and visualization.

• Daily Rotation - Headlines from 300+ tech sites.

• Digital Journal - A user-driven news community with a ranking and revenue sharing system.

• DotNetKicks - A community based news site edited by members, specializing in Microsoft development techniques, technologies and tools.

• Findory - A personalized information portal for news, weblogs, video and podcasts.

• Freshnews.org - Tech news from around the net.

• Informednews.com - Most informative news feeds from top news sources with customizable RSS feeds (includes streaming podcasts).

• I Want Media - Daily media news and gossip with a comprehensive media resources page.

• Newgie - Examines user activity on news stories and uses predictive analytics, to assign a score to each article. The higher an article's score, the more likely users are to find that article interesting.

• NewsfeedZ - Tech & entertainment feeds on one webpage.

• Newsmap - An application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.

• Newsvine - News aggregation including the entire Associated Press wire.

• NEWZingo Google News tag cloud.

• PR Web - Press release news service.

• Shoutwire - Community ranked internet news site.

• Spotback Top Stories - A personalized news service that learns from user interaction and community behaviour.

• TailRank - Social news recommendations.

• Target Your News - A social news site where free advertising is actively encouraged and news items are ranked using a recommendation system..

• Tech News - the top aggregators of tech and geek news.

• TECHzingo - Technology news cloud.

• Wikio - A personalized news page that lets people publish news items, rate news stories, specify tags for news filtering and tracking, search media sites, blogs and member publications. The Wikio Live page shows a real-time view of captured news items.

Key people, technologies and websites at the hub of Open Media and Social Media developments.

• Creative Commons blog - News and announcements from the CC licensing organization.

• Open Media 100 - List of bloggers, social networkers, tool smiths, and investors leading the Open Media Revolution.

• Open Media Directory - A clearinghouse for legal, podsafe music and video sources, including Public Domain works, Copyleft works, Creative Commons and other forms of licensed content.

• Unmediated - A blog that tracks and remediates news relating to new social media tools, processes and ideas.

• What's New at the Internet Archive - Highlighted content from the collection team's blog.

See also Media Search Engines in the music section above.

The latest podcast shows and podcast content buzz.

• Fresh Podcasts - Latest 100 podcast updates.

• Popcasts - Popular podcasts across directories and ranking sites.

• The Zing Index - Podzinger's who's being talked about in this week's podcasts.

RSS news feed tracking, trends and tools.

• Bloglines Most Popular Feeds and Links - An online feed reader and tracker.

• Daily RSS - A web-based news aggregator that allows its readers to rate the articles.

• Feed Pitstop - Links to syndication tools and resources for managing RSS/OPML feeds.

• Feedwhip - See what sites people are tracking via customized RSS feeds.

• Planet Mobile Web - Aggregates posts from various blogs focusing on the Mobile Web

• PubSub Stats - Interesting insights from data gathered about individual sites and the syndicated web.

• Rojo - Most read stories and feeds, frequent tags.

• RSS Compendium Blog - Continuous information about RSS readers, resources, tools, services.

• Syndic8 - Community tools for syndicated news feeds/podcasts, including statistics, XML reading lists and support services.

Insight on search engines, jobs, products, communication tools and technologies influencing the marketplace.

• eBay Pop - Captures some of the buying buzz, popular trends and fun things happening on eBay.

• New Communications Review - New communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication.

• Google Trends - See what the world is searching for.

• Google World Wide Search - Compare Google's results for different geographic locations.

• Google Zeitgeist - Search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google.

• Indeed.com Job Trends - Indeed gathers tens of millions of jobs each year from thousands of websites. Search this archive to plot graphs of job trends over time. List of all tools including widgets, RSS feeds and Salary Search.

• Mediaguide - Provides marketing information for the music, radio and advertising industries (music charts, ad charts etc).

• MSN Hotlist - MSN Network Zeitgeist.

• PlugIM - An internet marketing community where users submit content, share articles, comment on projects and promote favorites to the front page.

• Rollyo - Recently created and popular searchrolls.

• Search Engine Watch - Tips and information about search engines. Includes a list of resources that show What People Search For - Most Popular Keywords.

• Search Trends by Pandia - More links to search trend sources and aggregate data.

• Yahoo! Buzz Index - Search spikes and trends.

News and rich data about software projects, metrics, beta releases and Open Source development.

• Betas.Intercom.Net - Software news and beta reviews.

• Download Squad - Collaborative blogging and contributions on all kinds of cool software. View all posts tagged software on Weblogs Inc network.

• Ohloh - The most current software metrics and project information on open source software projects.

• SWiK - Collaborative documentation of open source software.

See also Web 2.0 for web applications.

See also Zeitgeist Toolbox for creating social applications.

These are mainly sites that aggregate Web 2.0 resources including singlegators with feeds of classic Web 2.0 blogs. For an overview of Web 2.0 and further knowledge resources see Wikipedia Web 2.0

• 3spots - Provides comprehensive lists of social media resources for example: All the Digg Style Applications: The List has dozens of online community buzz applications.

• Best of the Best Web 2.0 Websites - A catagorized list of recommended services.

• Catagoriz - Sitemap to Web 2.0 products and services.

• eConsultant - Ultimate Web Developer Lists, Web 2.0 Directory, Technical Tips and Lists.

• eHub - A constantly updated list of Web 2.0 applications.

• European web2 startups - Frappr! group map.

• Everything 2.0 - A blog cataloging Web 2.0 startups with thousands of categorized links.

• Listible! Web 2.0 - List of Web 2.0 sites and tools.

• MoMB - The Museum of Modern Betas catalogs thousands of web-based applications. Also provides Hot/Top app lists for buzz-tracking based on statistical information.

• NEO Binaries - A web 2.0 community for web based applications.

• ProgrammableWeb - Keep up to date with the latest mashups and new Web 2.0 APIs.

• Web2List - Web 2.0 community ranked sites.

• Web2logo - Find Web2.0 sites using logos.

• Web 2.0 Central - Web 2.0 companies, discussions, mashups and toolkits.

• Web 2.0 del.icio.us bookmarks - Shared links for applications and services.

• Web 2.0 Mashup Center - Popular online applications.

• Web 2.0 World Outline - List of companies and feeds.

Singlegators

• AZ.to - Single-page aggregators and search for: Technology, Gadgets, BitTorrent, Web 2.0, Hot Deals, Videos, Jobs, Blogs, Sport.

• Original Signal - Provides a choice of single-page aggregators including: Tech, Jobs, Gadgets, Digg, Buzz, Web 2.0.

• Transmitt - Web 2.0 blogs aggregation.

• Web 2.0 - The classic Web 2.0 blogs.

• Web 2.0 Workgroup - Network of Web 2.0 resources.

Web traffic analysis, data visualizations, statistics, site audience estimations, usage patterns and trends.

• Akamai: Visualizing Global Web Performance - Provides Internet traffic data visualizations and net usage indices.

• Alexa traffic top 500 - Browse the most popular sites on the web.

• Amaztype Zeitgeist - Sampling Amazon popular words during last 7 days.

• Compete - Enter a domain URL to get a SnapShot profile, traffic history, trust assessment, coupon codes, etc.

• Google Analytics - A free service for tracking traffic and website statistics.

• Quantcast - Website traffic measurement and audience estimates.

• Seth Godin's Web 2.0 Traffic Watch List - Traffic Comparison using Alexa Rank.

• Statbrain - Estimates how many visits a website has based on offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc.

• URLfan - Discover what sites bloggers are referencing in real time and the top 100 ranked sites.

• Wikicharts - Shows the articles from the English Wikipedia that are viewed most.

Handy tools, search engines and resources for creating your own social applications and further exploration.

Create Applications

• Bozpages - Create your own RSS feed singlegator.

• Dapper: The Data Mapper - Allows you to build web applications and mashups using data from any website. Construct your own aggregator using AggregatorAid without any programming.

• FeedRaider - Create your own text/video/audio/photos based singlegators. Allows customization of looks and Deck/River views.

• Ning - A free online service for cloning, customizing and sharing Social Web Apps. Allows you to build Websites for videos, photos and groups.

SpeedyFeed.com : Social Syndication - Create your own RSS/Atom feed singlegator.

Gadgets and Widgets

• Widget Finder - Find mini-applications, generators, hacks and design resources for accessorizing desktops, blogs and social spaces. The Widget Finder Search Swicki

is optimized for hunting widgets, web-based tools and design solutions.

Search Tools - RSS/OPML Generators

• FeedGit Meta-Search - A search engine tool designed to locate Web feeds from major search, job and video engines. Covers a wide range of sources and media types and will also generate OPML.

• Tag Central Meta-Search - Generate RSS feeds using keywords for searches on Flickr, Smugmug, Wists, Technorati, BlogMarks, 43 Things, del.icio.us, Connotea, Furl, Upcoming.org, Jots, de.lirio.us, Consumating.

• TagFetch Meta-Search - Search across Blogs, News, Bookmarks and Media sites for items tagged by descriptive keywords. All results generate RSS feeds.

• TagJag - A metasearch and zeitgeist tool for scouring hundreds of news feeds. It also generates OPML feeds from any search query.

Zeitgeist Information

• Google Define: zeitgeist

• Wikipedia Zeitgeist

There's room for more recommended sites in the comments area below, additions are much appreciated.