7 Sites to Keep Your Fingers on the Pulse of the Web
In both my day job, and while surfing from the couch, I want to know what’s hot in the digital world – right this very minute. For my generation and below, the pulse of the web is so much closer to our experience, as opposed to a ticker running on CNN or MSNBC. Sorting through the RSS feeds to pull out the patterns of the day can quickly become an overwhelming task if you are with some crucial shortcuts and online filters. The following is a list of a few of my favorite shortcuts to digital zeitgeist nirvana:
Not a lot of attention is paid to this Yahoo! property, but it’s still one of the better social bookmarking sites on the web. With a great established user base from it’s time as an independent, and some significant improvements to the UI over the last year, delicious.com has remained a relevant daily stopover to pick up on the zeitgeist of the web. The popular page displays the top links bookmarked in previous 24 hours, so you can pretty much catch the newest, and most collectable links as they rise over the course of a day.
No doubt the current trend of “real time” everything is due in large part to the rise of twitter. So, obviously, it would be good place to start when tracking the pulse of the web in real time. Twitter does have a lot of currency from the Trending Topics that display on the sites sidebar, and that’s important to monitor, but Tweetmeme.com is a great running list of what is being linked to on Twitter, sorted by the number of tweets. The menu bar has a lot of great buttons, and features are released now and again to keep things fresh.
See Also: Digg.com and Reddit.com, however their news cycle is a little bit longer, and less immediate, and you really have to appreciate the audience to become a loyalist to either site.
3. The Hype Machine – Popular on Twitter Today
Related to TweetMeme is the Hype Machine listing of the MP3s that have been posted (and discussed) on blogs all over the web. Songs on the list are sorted by thier points, which are calculated by how many tweets each post has generated. Each MP3 is playable, so you can listen, and stay on top of what music is being discussed on any given day.
Remixes of previously popular songs are by far the most exchanged songs on the web.
Also in the music category would be the MTV Top 100 Most Viewed Today. Which lists the video files on their site by how many views it has accumulated in the last 24 hours.
4. Youtube.com Most Viewed Today
A listing of the most played videos of the day, and now includes a content box with the “Trending Topics.”
Updated every 30 minutes this page will track what the most search terms are within any 30 minutes period.
A great resource for trends in the social media space is AllFacebook.com. As the statistics for the amount of time spent on Facebook continue to grow and astound, keeping on top of which applications are growing the quickest, and have the most daily active users, is a great indication of where all that time spend is going. AllFacebook.com tracks both the top applications, by active users, and also the most popular Pages by Fan growth.
This is important if you want to limit your real-time updates to specific keywords, people, or subjects of your choosing, not the cloud’s. Pop in a phrase, noun or name and up comes the current chatter about them. Great for following up on a snippet you overheard on the bus, or on some screen out of the corner of your eye in an elevator.
See also: OneRiot.com.
