Heat Seeking  

You may want to make your own noise, but it can’t hurt to know what everyone else is talking about, and where. It can also give you a big SEO boost to write about hot topics.

Some tracking tools:

Google Trends can show you how often topics you care about are searched, and when they hit Google News.  The information can be broken down by regions.  If you want to be of the moment Google  tracks suddenly popular search topics, and updates the information during the day.  You can also compare website traffic.

Compete.com lets you compare traffic on up to three sites at a time, as well as what key words brought visitors there -competitor  information you can usefully reverse engineer to try and snag the same traffic.

Tweetstats.com gives you bar graphs of what’s trending on Twitter – it’s up to you to decipher whether Julian Assange or Morgan Freeman is more relevant to your world.

Whatthehashtag.com provides a running guide to Twitter topics that want to find each other.  You can reverse engineer the process, using tags to search out topics you’re interested in.

Whatthetrend is its parent site, tracking what’s Twitting Hot in which country and allowing you to break Tweet trends down by city.  The site also makes a stab at explaining what they are about.

Sometimes Words Fail

Booshaka.com lets you search trending Facebook topics and subtopics.

Where do you go to find what’s trendy?