Eavesdrop on the Internet With Trendrr

Trendrr, a business intelligence site, unveiled a new platform today that seeks to answer a basic question: What is the internet saying about your brand? What with the countless blogs, microblogs, news aggregators, and video sites people congregate to, filled with countless status messages, chats, posts, and tweets....How could anyone possibly get a read on it all?

But Trendrr, founded in 2006, does just that. Trendrr collates publicly available data streams from all over the Internet and assembles it into a series of graphs and charts, letting you know who is influencing the conversation on a given topic, what percentage of mentions are positive, negative, or neutral, and where in the world that topic is most buzzworthy. Coming fresh to a Trendrr page is a bit overwhelming, like seeing the inside of a cockpit the first time. But data-junkies everywhere praise the site for its ease of use.

Trendrr has its fair share of competition. Recent years have seen an explosion of reputation-monitoring services. Visible Technologies is a prominent one, offering two different servcies--TruCast, which lets you comment directly on blogs, and TruView, which focuses on optimizing Google searches for your brand. Cision claims to monitor over 100 million blogs and microblogs. Big names like Nielsen, with its BuzzMetrics service, have a share of the market as well. The differentiating factor among these services is how real-time the real-time analytics are, and how well designed the interface is.