One Man Band

So you have an idea you want to turn into a business, but you need more information.

Being tech-savvy and plugged in, you want to find out what activity in that area already exists, maybe lurk around active blogs on the topic.

How do you find those blogs?

Marshall Kirkpatrick at ReadWriteWeb takes stock of the current tools available to identify top blogs in niche topics:

Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It’s one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. I’ve been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so I thought I’d write up some quick pros and cons of the options I’m familiar with. Perhaps you’ll add some of your own favorite methods in comments.

Unfortunately, Technorati’s not what it used to be anymore.

Mr. Kirkpatrick looks over six current web tools, including Technorati. None quite serves up what he’s looking for.

There’s an opening for improved service. Anybody listening?

Meanwhile, his list of tools and how to use them is useful to getting your background research done now.

My personal favorite on his list is AideRSS because I had previously never heard of it.

I plugged in the RSS feed for this blog. Here is the analysis from AideRSS:

The number at the far left is AideRSS’s PostRank™, an evaluation of the quality of the post. According to AideRSS’s FAQ:

PostRank™ is a scoring system that we have developed to rank each article on relevance and reaction. It is a core part of the AideRSS engine that works to ensure that this digital assistant is helping you to tame the RSS beast and keep your news stream manageable.

Looking back at my blog’s analysis, it’s not entirely shabby. The high PostRank™ for three of my posts soothes my disappointment in the lack of conversations. Not a smooth bell curve in the quality — looks more like “Hook ’em, Horns!” than a standard distribution!

For comparison, I plugged in Bizosphere, the new home of the Carnival of the Capitalists:

Bizosphere (hi, Jay!) has a livelier analysis — the middle of the PostRank™ bell curve is filled in and the columns on the far right are lit up, showing activity related to the blog at such places as Digg and de.icio.us and the number of comments left by readers of the blog.

One last comparative analysis. Here is what happened when I plugged in Seth Godin’s blog:

Here you can easily see that Seth Godin is far more part of the online conversation that little old me: the columns on the right display much more interaction and conversation than here at One Man Band. The quality of his posts is also much more of a bell curve than my crummy-or-superlative distribution. So the overall value of reading his blog would be higher, sad to say. In my defense: I have three (3!) posts ranked 10 in my most recent 10 posts, and Seth has zero (0!).

AideRSS is a good tool to know how to use. Add it to your online business toolkit.