Boomerang

The Topix search engine, which covers both blog and news sources, has updated itself with an interesting new feature: When searching for a particular news or blog item, Topix provides an interactive graph that shows the highs and lows of mentions over a one year period. Clicking on a portion of the graph will narrow results to that particular period of time. You can also easily segregate blogs and news sources. This is a valuable tool for PR professionals who regularly monitor and report on news and trends.

TechCrunch has an interesting article up about Bix, an online service (currently in invite-only beta) that allows sponsors to easily create and control contests. Sponsors can allow entrants to submit video, audio, or photo content and can even allow voting if they are really after the “American Idol” feel. For marketers, Bix provides an opportunity to interact with target customers and provides opportunities not just to increase brand visibility, but to offer such things as coupons and offers.

Blog SolutionWatch reports the launch of new service Commentful, a tool that allows users to keep track of discussions on new media sites. Users create a watchlist of sites to track and are notified of updates when they log into their account. A FireFox extension is also available, which provides real-time updates. This is useful for anyone who needs to keep track of ongoing discussions that might affect their clients, but doesn’t have the resources to baby-sit the conversation. Oh, and Commentful isn’t the first in this space – competitors include coComment and co.mments.

According to Reuters (link courtesy of CNET) FeedBurner, which syndicates 346,000 feeds for 212,000 bloggers, has purchased blog analytics company BlogBeat. BlogBeat provides bloggers with real-time information about their blog such as which content is being read by whom, and what is most popular. FeedBurner will be offering the new functionality for free under the FeedBurner StandardStats service. Fee-based services aren’t planned until 2007. For corporate and commercial bloggers, this makes FeedBurner the top choice for blog and feed analytics, particularly now that it is free.