Topix.net has launched a new design and a few nice new features.
The look is a little cleaner than it’s previous incarnation but of more interest to me is it’s new graphing feature that lets you look back over a year’s indexing of news sources to see how many times a keyword has been mentioned.
Plug in the term ‘blogging’ and you get the following graph (click to enlarge):
Click on the blue bars to narrow your search for the term to that period of time (so you can see what might have caused a leap or lull in citations).
found via Steve Rubel
update: After playing with it for a little while I’ve come to the same conclusion as Steve – it would be much more useful if you could compare one term with another (either that of it they gave numbers of citations per day so you could manually compare).
Something like what Google Trends does in allowing comparisons would be handy like the following comparison of the amount of people searching Google for ‘podcasting’ (red) and ‘blogging’ (blue):
I know they are tracking different things (ie Topix tracks citations in news sources and Google Trends tracks searches in Google – but if Topix were to take a similar approach it’d be very useful data.