Social Web Research and Popularity Indexes

Business Thursday: Finding popular sources is a crucial mean of research to find and interact with influencers. Here are some new services to research the blogosphere, forums and the social web.

BoardsMD.com is a research tool for boards and forums. They have an own ranking system called the Health Score. This ranking system counts the number of members of forums, the amount of posts and the activity by scoring discussions. There are a lot of tools available to find and match forums related to topics and to find most active forums. Furthermore there are several monitoting tools, email alerts to stay informed about particular boards and at the website there are rankings about various topics. Last but not least board owners may become listed at the directory.

TopOfBlogs is a blog ranking service using own metrics and integrates third party metrics, which makes it a meta tool for blog research. They are counting pageviews and feed subscribers. Integrated third party services are Google PageRank, Alexa Ranking and Technorati Ranks. Blogger may list their weblog at the directory.

DiggTop shows top rated stories and media at Digg. It is a desktop tool to gather information and for monitoring.

SocialMention is both a search engine and research tool. It monitors and searches the social web in real time and by this it is showing up to date search results. The search engine is able to find various kind of media and posts. It searches blogs, bookmarks, news, videos and even comments and microblogging services.

You will find further related popularity indexes and social media research tools by the link Social Media Research.