A week ago, Technorati turned over a new leaf, with the return of charts throughout the company's blog search service. Very quietly, the company also has enabled Web surfers to compare trends between keyword pairs, by using the VS command.This "officially unsupported" command (per ex-CEO David Sifry), allows for comparisons of what's hot and what's not, over a specific time period, to a stretch as long as six months.
(The code: http://www.technorati.com/search/TERM1+vs+TERM2?authority=n&language=en)
Running a few comparisons myself, we saw more people are blogging about Slashdot than I had anticipated, especially relative to Digg, that the iPhone shot like a meteor to eclipse the iPod, and that a battle for higher profile between Robert Scoble and TechCrunch or Jason Calacanis and ValleyWag just might never be resolved. It's that close.
For all charts: Note the peaks and dips for weekends, as well as the scope of the chart. The most popular keywords register in the thousands, while less frequently discussed items just crack triple digits.
First Up: iPod vs. iPhone
In the Search World: Yahoo! vs. Google
Building a Community: Digg vs. Slashdot (Big surprise here!)
Social Networking: Facebook vs. MySpace
(MySpace plunging, with Facebook eking up...)
Long-Time Tech Titans: Apple vs. Microsoft
New Age Blog Titans: TechCrunch vs. Scoble
Let's Be Friends Edition: Calacanis vs. Valleywag
Mix and match the terms and see what you come up with. Others I tried included "baseball vs football", and Plaxo vs LinkedIn. What can you come up with, and do these charts accurately track the blogosphere's momentum as you see it?