The Pulse of Blogs- From Yandex

Interesting...

Remember Google's "Trends" feature? (if not go to google.com/trends) Well, this is the same tool that covers Russina blogsphere.

"Yandex has introduced a new feature called the "Pulse of the Blogosphere," which allows one to track the number of mentions of a term (and compare up to six terms at once) within the Russian blogosphere over time. On the FAQ page for this project, currently still in beta, Yandex explains why this might be of interest:

With the help of the Pulse of the Blogosphere you can see how internet public opinion on various events has changed over time and compare different items. Keep your hand on the pulse! [...]

The Pulse allows you to create charts of the frequency of mentions of words or phrases over various periods of time. You can see how public interest to various topics has changed dating back to the moment that the Russian-language blogosphere appeared.Yandex seems to date this back to the middle of 2001, and they weight mentions based on the number of blogs to minimize distortion created by the explosion in the number of blogs:

Since the blogosphere is growing, a thousand entries five years ago was a bigger percentage of all blog entries than ten thousand today.I decided to test out this new tool by comparing something the Russian government would rather have people blog about and something it perhaps would rather people blog less about. Looking at a comparison of nanotechnologies and Chechnya in the past year , it is apparent that Sergei Ivanov has achieved a great deal - nanotechnologies in the past month have been mentioned almost as often as Chechnya.

Looking at the same search terms over the past several years shows what an accomplishment this is.I then had to try this new tool out on one of my favorite topics - the unresolved post-Soviet conflicts. Russian bloggers seem much more interested in Abkhazia than in any of the other "unresolved conflict regions" (perhaps because Abkhazia is the only one of those regions where lots of Russians go on holiday):Пульс блогосферы по запросам абхазия, приднестровье, нагорно карабах и южная осетия

Yes, Yandex allows you to pull html and use it in your blog.Then I moved on to Putin vs. Bush - the Russian president gets about 4000 mentions a day; the US president, about 1500. Even factoring in Bush's 225 mentions to Putin's roughly 100 per day in English, unsurprisingly the Russian blogosphere is more interested in VVP than in Bush 43.The flaws in a simple term-based search are obvious - e.g., blogs might refer to Putin as ВВП, and the same abbreviation refers to Gross Domestic Product; in trying to pinpoint Sergei Ivanov, a search for "Ivanov" will be too inclusive and a search for "Sergei Ivanov" not inclusive enough. Also, the interface doesn't seem to accept "or" queries.

Also, it's not clear what blogs it measures - "the Russian-language blogosphere" presumably includes all livejournal sites in Russian, but of course these may not all be based in Russia. For example, it's possible (though unlikely) that Abkhazia's more frequent mention in the tally above is due to a higher number of people blogging about the subject in Russian from Abkhazia and Georgia. And it does return some results for terms like "Bush" and "Putin" in English. But hey, it's still in beta. And I think it's going to be a fun tool to compare all sorts of things."

http://scrapsofmoscow.blogspot.com/2007/09/pulse-of-blogs-from-yandex.html