3 Effective Ways To See What’s Trending On The Web

One thing you’ve got to love about the internet is that it’s always awake and busy. If NYC is considered to be the city that never sleeps, then what are we supposed to call the Internet? Every single day that I sit down in my comfortable little chair and stare at this monitor, there are new and exciting things happening. With these new happenings come a slew of excitement, opportunity, and entertainment.Lucky for you and I (or well, unlucky in some situations), it’s very easy to track things that are trending now on the web. When Web 2.0 came into full bloom,  internet became more social and trendy than ever. If Kim Kardashian gets a new pimple on her chin, you better believe it’ll be on Twitter and available as news to you within a few seconds. That’s just the way  internet works in 2012.
Taking all of that into consideration, let’s scale up. Not only do we want to be able to track these trends, but we want instant access to trends that are hot and buzzing. For that, I’ve got three very simple and popular websites that I enjoy using.

Google Trends

Google Trends is the simplest and most obvious solution to see what’s trending now. The search engine is the core of the internet. It is the car to the road. As Google has a direct advertising platform tied into their backend, it should go without saying that they track every nook and cranny when it comes to search analytics. Doing so allows Google Trends to react as one of the most accurate and powerful trend trackers on the web.
Clicking on or searching for a trend will allow you to see an analytical profile for those keywords. It will scale the “hotness,” give you related searches, show a graph of the search activity, and give you some relevant search and blog results for the term.

Google is a search powerhouse and controlling such a powerhouse web property really allows them to point out what’s popular.

What the Trend

What the Trend uses the internet’s most trendy social network, Twitter, to graph out and explain what is trending right now.
My favorite thing about WtT is that it goes in great depth to not only present trends, but to explain why they are trending and show you a history of the trend. It saves you time. The typical user would pop onto the Twitterverse, look at the day’s trending topics, and query up Google. You can eliminate that last step if you use WtT.

Another great feature is the ability to track trends by location. A lot of these websites really neglect spots outside of the US. What the Trend tracks topics for every major country.

BuzzFeed

I like to refer to BuzzFeed as the TMZ of trendy internet. While it doesn’t monitor “topics” in the same way as our previous two websites do, BF does a great job of sharing viral content that will make you say LOL, OMG, or WTF.

BuzzFeed’s Top 20 Most Viral page is also a great way to gauge what has gone on in the past week. BuzzFeed does a great job in categorizing its content so you’re able to narrow trends to specific topics that you’re interested in. BuzzFeed’s iPhone app is definitely worth a look, too.