Web Buzz Explorer: The Social Media and Web 2.0 News Hub

A window on the buzzscape surrounding Social Media, from brilliant blogs to viral videos, it's a hub for the hype.

You can use the categorized list of tools and services to scour online news, track personal projects, watch trends and discover new media. The sources are especially useful for exploring the most recent and most popular emergent data on social networks.

This is a living hub that aims to connect people with the cream of information floating to the top of social networks and news sources. Many of the sites harness the wisdom of crowds and display the results in easy to digest formats such as single page aggregators and news rivers. The list is constantly being refined for improved power browsing and data mining resources.

You're welcome to share related sites and projects in the comments area.

You can also share this list and build upon it under the terms of this Creative Commons license, attributing David Holmes as the author and this Hubpage as the source.

See my Posterous blog for musings about Internet Music, Open Content, and the Social Web. Follow me on Twitter

Videos

Throughout the Hub you'll find a selection of informative and entertaining videos that provide support and contextual insight for each topic.

Further Research

MIT Center for Collective Intelligence - This important resource provides tools, information and media concerning the development of social networks and related fields. CCI's basic research question is: How can people and computers be connected so that-collectively-they act more intelligently than any individuals, groups, or computers have ever done before?'

CCI's Handbook of Collective Intelligence is an open wiki that provides a survey of the field of collective intelligence. The work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

DIY Social Applications

If you want to create your own social applications there's a selection of links to get you started in the Zeitgeist Toolbox at the bottom of the hub.

News and resources for Apple products and Mac users.

• Mac Hash - Aggregates up to the minute Apple Mac News.

• i use this - A democratic way to rate applications by counting the number of users to define the value of an app. Useful for organizing, discovering and updating software.

• Macitt - A digg style community for the Apple web.

• Weblogs Inc Network - View all recent blog posts tagged Apple.

Popular blogs, timely posts, and vanity tracking tools.

• BlogShares - A fun fantasy blog share market.

• CNET Blog 100 - News.com's hand picked list of top blogs.

• Hot Links - Blog aggregation and link database updated hourly.

• Metafilter - A community weblog with views for the most recent and most popular posts.

• Technorati Top 100 Blogs - A zeitgeist for the blogosphere revealing the hottest blogs and the most influential overall blog posts. Visit the Tag page to see how many articles have used that tag over the past month.

• Top 500 Folders in Bloglines - Find the most popular topics and relevant feeds.

• The Truth Laid Bear Blogging Ecosystem - A list of weblogs ranked by the number of incoming links they receive from other weblogs on the list.

• Twitscoop - Hot Trends and a buzz-cloud of what's hot on Twitter right now.

• TwitterSweet Music Search - A Google Custom Search Engine for finding music stuff.

• Twitt(url)y - Real-time link tracking on Twitter.

Ping Watching - WARNING - these sites may contain links to adult content.

• Pingoat - View recently updated blogs using this popular ping notification service.

• Syndic8 - 200 most recently pinged feeds.

• Weblogs.com - A real time view of recently updated weblogs.

Shared bookmarks and popular links in the blogosphere.

• Daily Mashup - Popular photos, bookmarks and news.

• Fark - A user submitted link-log with a humorous and satirical bias.

• FeedDigest Zeitgeist - Most linked to and popular Web pages on an hourly basis.

• Linkfilter - Fresh links posted & moderated by users.

• memepool - A collaborative link-log with interesting and frivalous finds.

• Memestreams - A social web surfing tool that helps communities of people work together to find interesting content on the Internet.

• Oishii - del.icio.us mini-zeitgeist.
• Plime - A pliable tree of interesting links, cultivated and pruned by everyone.

• PopCurrent - Community critics vote and promote music, videos, podcasts, images and books.

• Reddit - User driven source for what's new and popular online.

• Sanjeev.NET - Top 1000 bookmarked & blogged links (updated continuously throughout the day).

• SpinSpy - Bookmarked news stories with community ranking and political bias rating.
• StumbleUpon Buzz- Uses ratings to form collaborative opinions on website quality. When you stumble, you will only see pages which friends and like-minded stumblers have recommended.

• Web Feeds - Highest rated shared bookmarks.

Track news sites, blogs, conversations and feeds for emerging topics, trends and popular media.

• AOL Netscape - A social news portal programmed by the audience. A ranking algorithm is used to promote the most popular stories.

• Blogpulse - An automated trend discovery system for blogs. Provides blog search, buzz-tracking and analysis tools..

• BuzzFeed - Buzz detection, editorial commentary and tracking that helps you find the sites with the most interesting stories in a range of topics.

• Buzztracker - Gives a visual representation of news on the net using a global map and Google data.

• Digg Original Signal - Overview of popular headlines including: Rearrange Digg categories, Digg RSS feed, Digg Widget, Page Statistics.

• Megite river of news - Croudsourcing and memetracking.

• Popdex - Crawls over 14,000 sites daily to determine the most popular links.

• Talk Digger - Find and track Web conversations - see who's linking to you.

• Techmeme - Uncovers the most relevant items from thousands of news sites and weblogs.

• Web 2.0 announcer - A social news aggregator that provides a list of the most current and talked about stories.

• What's Making Blog News? - Provides ranked lists of new and popular stories.

• Woblog - A collective-intelligence social tool designed to rescue the best stories from blogs.

Various single page aggregators that display the most popular recent news from influencial blogs and online communities.

• Are You That Bored? - A mix of popular feeds and images.

• Diggdot.us - digg, slashdot, del.icio.us popular.

• Feedorama - Single-page feed aggregators in a choice of channels (Spanish language).

• FeedRaider - Text/video/audio/photos aggregation in various topics with the ability to create your own singlegators.

• Mashfot - A mashup about photography showing the latest news, photos and popular links.

• Nowsy - A customizable news and info dashboard.

• PopDeal - A hub for the latest and most popular deals from around the the web (newsriver).

• PopFeedo - Displays Digg, Del.icio.us, Wired Technology, Reddit, Slashdot, and Yahoo Top News.

• Popfeeds - Source for fresh daily news lifted from the web across several main categories.

• Popurls - Aggregates the latest web buzz from more than 20 popular sites. Popurls Mobile

• Qoogle News - Japanese singlegator with a mix of popular photos, bookmarks and news sites.

• SpeedyFeed Popular - Social syndication portal and create your own single page aggregator.

• ViralBabble - Best of del.icio.us, Digg, Lifehacker, YouTube, Fark, Slashdot, iFilm, Gizmodo, Furl, Reddit with archives.

• VirtualReview: China - Gathers news and opinion about China.

• THEWEBLIST.net - Aggregated feeds portal for popular news and links.

• xmlhttprequest - Links and news about the best of ajax, Web 2.0, javascript, css, api, etc.

See also Web 2.0 below for more classic singlegators.

Computer video games news and developments.

• WiiNintendo - Nintendo Wii aggregated news feeds (singlegator).

Information gathering resources and tools for sharing ideas.

• Data360 - A collaborative website built to help people find, present and share data.

• Global : Ideas : Bank - Contains thousands of ideas from every corner of the globe, filtered by recent and popular for quick browsing.

• Swivel - Allows you to explore all kinds of public data and share ideas.

Books, catalogs, databases, lists and information mining resources.

• LibraryThing Users - Social book cataloging zeitgeist.

• ResearchBuzz - Provides news about search engines, databases, and other information collections.

• ResourceShelf - Useful resources and news for information professionals.

• Squidoo Top 100 Lenses - Explore the knowledge community and user curated pages for all kinds of topics.

• The Shifted Librarian - A library weblog focusing on cool tools and the shift in information distribution.

Sites for new music discovery, free MP3 audio downloads, music news aggregation, playlists, audio products, worldwide charts and data analysis.

• Blentwell - DJ mixset link collective & zeitgeist.

• ccMixter News Aggregator - Open music news from friends of ccMixter focusing on Creative Commons music plus all the remixable audio files from community artists and DJs.

• eBay Want It Now - Latest music items wanted to buy.

• Every instrument on Amazon - Coverpop's visual zeitgeist of product information.

• HubLog - A Top mp3 blogs list.

• The Hype Machine - a list of the most popular songs from MP3 blogs. Also features a yearly Music Blogs Zeitgeist.

• Starfrosch - A user driven mp3 blog with podcasts where people submit/rate music and videos which are compiled into social charts (weekly, monthly, yearly).

• Weblogs Inc Music Tag - All the latest music blog posts across the network.

Internet Data Analysis and Worldwide Music Charts

• BigChampagne TweetStream - An aggregated stream of music industry news tweets. Also a single page aggregator for breaking music news.

• Charts All Over the World - Provides search and links to music charts.

• Last.fm Charts - Shows how many people on Last.fm listened to something in a given week. Here are the Creative Commons Tag Charts.

• Yes - The 100 most popular songs as voted by the audience of the nation's top 2,600 Radio and virtually all Music TV Stations (U.S.). The data feed is provided by Mediaguide.

Media Search Engines

• Creative Commons Search - Provides multiple engines for searching main Open Media hubs with the option to filter searches by desired source, media type, and Creative Commons license. Use it to find free music, videos, images, and other media.

• Open Music Search - This Google Custom Search Engine (CSE) penetrates straight to the heart of the Open Music Ecosystem. Indexing more than 150 hand-picked resources with advanced filtering of media pools. Use it to find free music, sound samples, open source software, people, and other copyleft media services.

See also Web Traffic, Search Trends & Internet Marketing below.

People powered news communities, news tracking services and visualization.

• Daily Rotation - Headlines from 300+ tech sites.

• Digital Journal - A user-driven news community with a ranking and revenue sharing system.

• DotNetKicks - A community based news site edited by members, specializing in Microsoft development techniques, technologies and tools.
• Freshnews.org - Tech news from around the net.

• Informednews.com - Most informative news feeds from top news sources with customizable RSS feeds (includes streaming podcasts).

• I Want Media - Daily media news and gossip with a comprehensive media resources page.

• Newgie - Examines user activity on news stories and uses predictive analytics, to assign a score to each article. The higher an article's score, the more likely users are to find that article interesting.

• NewsfeedZ - Tech & entertainment feeds on one webpage.

• Newsmap - An application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News news aggregator.

• Newsvine - News aggregation including the entire Associated Press wire.

• NEWZingo - Google News tag cloud.

• Propeller - AOL's social news portal programmed by you the audience. Members post and rate links to stories from all over the web.

• PR Web - Press release news service.

• Shoutwire - Community ranked internet news site.

• Spotback Top Stories - A personalized news service that learns from user interaction and community behaviour.

• TailRank - Social news recommendations.

• Tech News - the top aggregators of tech and geek news.

• Wikio - A personalized news page that lets people publish news items, rate news stories, specify tags for news filtering and tracking, search media sites, blogs and member publications.

Key people, technologies and websites at the hub of Open Media and Social Media developments.

• Creative Commons blog - News and announcements from the CC licensing organization.

• What's New at the Internet Archive - Highlighted content from the collection team's blog.

See also Media Search Engines in the music section above.

The latest podcast shows and podcast content buzz.

• Popcasts - Popular podcasts across directories and ranking sites.

• The Zing Index - Podzinger's who's being talked about in this week's podcasts.

RSS news feed tracking, trends and tools.

• Bloglines Most Popular Feeds and Links - An online feed reader and tracker.

• Daily RSS - A web-based news aggregator that allows its readers to rate the articles.

• Feedwhip - See what sites people are tracking via customized RSS feeds.

• Planet Mobile Web - Aggregates posts from various blogs focusing on the Mobile Web

• Rojo - Most read stories and feeds, frequent tags.

• RSS Compendium Blog - Continuous information about RSS readers, resources, tools, services.

• Syndic8 - Community tools for syndicated news feeds/podcasts, including statistics, XML reading lists and support services.

Insight on search engines, jobs, products, communication tools and technologies influencing the marketplace.

• eBay Pop - Captures some of the buying buzz, popular trends and fun things happening on eBay.

• New Communications Review - New communications tools, technologies and emerging modes of communication.

• Google Trends - See what the world is searching for.

• Google World Wide Search - Compare Google's results for different geographic locations.

• Google Zeitgeist - Search patterns, trends, and surprises according to Google.

• Indeed.com Job Trends - Indeed gathers tens of millions of jobs each year from thousands of websites. Search this archive to plot graphs of job trends over time. List of all tools including widgets, RSS feeds and Salary Search.

• Mediaguide - Provides marketing information for the music, radio and advertising industries (music charts, ad charts etc).

• PlugIM - An internet marketing community where users submit content, share articles, comment on projects and promote favorites to the front page.

• Rollyo - Recently created and popular searchrolls.

• Search Engine Watch - Tips and information about search engines. Includes a list of resources that show What People Search For - Most Popular Keywords.

• Search Trends by Pandia - More links to search trend sources and aggregate data.

• Yahoo! Buzz Index - Search spikes and trends.

News and rich data about software projects, metrics, beta releases and Open Source development.

• Betas.Intercom.Net - Software news and beta reviews.

• Download Squad - Collaborative blogging and contributions on all kinds of cool software. View all posts tagged software on Weblogs Inc network.

• Ohloh - The most current software metrics and project information on open source software projects.

• SWiK - Collaborative documentation of open source software.

See also Web 2.0 for web applications.

See also Zeitgeist Toolbox for creating social applications.

Explore popular movies and find new video clips.

• HaHa.com - Aggregates the best and most popular videos from some of the video sites you're familiar with ... as well as some more obscure ones you may not have heard of.

• iwatchthis - An aggregate feed of favourite videos from across the web (videologs).

• Magg - Movie aggregator that can search across video platforms.

• Megite- Popular Internet Videos.

• PureVideo - A video meta-search engine that can pull in results from 100s of sites.

• Qoogle Video Clippers - A Japanese video community for sharing YouTube clips. Allows browsing of popular videos by Date or Top 30, Tag Clouds and Top Users..

• Social SWF - Movie clips at del.icio.us ranked according to number of blog posts with direct links.

• StumbleVideo - A video discovery tool where users can vote for cool videos.

• Tailrank - Popular video from the blogosphere.

• Technorati Popular Video - Lists the most popular video blogs and video media.

• The Amazing YouTube Tools Collection - A list of YouTube third party tools which enhance your YouTube experience. Also has a list of web mashups for Top/Best YouTube videos.

• The WorldTV Internet TV Charts - The most popular online video clips each week from Google, YouTube, Digg and VideoSift.

• YouTube Online Feed Reader - Lets you quickly access and read all the main YouTube RSS feeds and search for videos. Also provides tools for easy subscription to feeds, bookmarking videos and tracking blog links to videos.

• V Diddy - A web mashup that pulls in the top 12 videos from a choice of several popular video sites.

• Vidly Top Videos Today - A selection of popular videos based on viewing stats, updated hourly.

• Vidmeter - Gathers web data to provide an accurate representation of the most popular online videos on Break.com, Daily Motion, Google, iFilm, Metacafe, Myspace, Revver, vSocial, Yahoo, and Youtube. Syndication feeds and widgets

• Viral Video Chart - A list of the 25 videos generating the most buzz in the blogosphere.

• Wordpress Tag Videos - Aggregated blog posts in date order.

• Xanga Videos - The most recent, Top Boosted and Most Viewed videos on the Xanga weblog community.

These are mainly sites that aggregate Web 2.0 resources including single page aggregators with feeds of classic Web 2.0 blogs.

• All the Digg Style Applications: The List links to dozens of online community buzz applications.

• Best of the Best Web 2.0 Websites - A catagorized list of recommended services.

• Catagoriz - Sitemap to Web 2.0 products and services.

• eConsultant - Ultimate Web Developer Lists, Web 2.0 Directory, Technical Tips and Lists.

• eHub - A constantly updated list of Web 2.0 applications.

• Everything 2.0 - A blog cataloging Web 2.0 startups with thousands of categorized links.

• MoMB - The Museum of Modern Betas catalogs thousands of web-based applications. Also provides Hot/Top app lists for buzz-tracking based on statistical information.

• ProgrammableWeb - Keep up to date with the latest mashups and new Web 2.0 APIs.

• Web2List - Web 2.0 community ranked sites.

• Web2logo - Find Web2.0 sites using logos.

• Web 2.0 Central - Web 2.0 companies, discussions, mashups and toolkits.

• Web 2.0 del.icio.us bookmarks - Shared links for applications and services.

• Web 2.0 Mashup Center - Popular online applications.

• Web 2.0 World Outline - List of companies and feeds.

Single Page Aggregators (singlegators)

• AZ.to - Single-page aggregators and search for: Technology, Gadgets, BitTorrent, Web 2.0, Hot Deals, Videos, Jobs, Blogs, Sport.

• Original Signal - Provides a choice of single-page aggregators including: Tech, Jobs, Gadgets, Digg, Buzz, Web 2.0.

• Transmitt - Web 2.0 blogs aggregation.

Web traffic analysis, data visualizations, statistics, site audience estimations, usage patterns and trends.

• Akamai: Visualizing Global Web Performance - Provides Internet traffic data visualizations and net usage indices.

• Amaztype Zeitgeist - Sampling Amazon popular words during last 7 days.

• Compete - Enter a domain URL to get a SnapShot profile, traffic history, trust assessment, coupon codes, etc.

• Google Analytics - A free service for tracking traffic and website statistics.

• Quantcast - Website traffic measurement and audience estimates.

• Statbrain - Estimates how many visits a website has based on offsite factors like backlinks, Alexa Rank etc.

• URLfan - Discover what sites bloggers are referencing in real time and the top 100 ranked sites.

• Wikipedia Article Traffic Statistics - Shows the articles from the English Wikipedia that are viewed most.

Handy tools, search engines and resources for creating your own social applications and further exploration.

Create Applications

• Dapper: The Data Mapper - Allows you to build web applications and mashups using data from any website. Construct your own aggregator using AggregatorAid without any programming.

• FeedRaider - Create your own text/video/audio/photos based singlegators. Allows customization of looks and Deck/River views.

• Ning - Allows you to create your own Social Websites with full community features (premium).

SpeedyFeed.com : Social Syndication - Create your own RSS/Atom feed singlegator.

Gadgets and Widgets

• Widget Finder - Find mini-applications, generators, hacks and design resources for accessorizing desktops, blogs and social spaces. The Widget Finder Search Swicki

is optimized for hunting widgets, web-based tools and design solutions.

Search Tools - RSS/OPML Generators

• FeedGit Meta-Search - A search engine tool designed to locate Web feeds from major search, job and video engines. Covers a wide range of sources and media types and will also generate OPML.

• Tag Central Meta-Search - Generate RSS feeds using keywords for searches on Flickr, Smugmug, Wists, Technorati, BlogMarks, 43 Things, del.icio.us, Connotea, Furl, Upcoming.org, Jots, de.lirio.us, Consumating.

• TagJag - A metasearch and zeitgeist tool for scouring hundreds of news feeds. It also generates OPML feeds from any search query.

Zeitgeist Information

• Google Define: zeitgeist

• Wikipedia Zeitgeist

You can leave similar websites and social media resources in the comments area below.