Five Ways to Be a Better Info Junkie with Topix.net

Although it doesn't get the attention it probably deserves, Topix.net is perhaps one of the world's most useful sites. It is easily one of my favorites. Every PR person and news junkie on the planet should be using Topix.

Unlike Google News and Yahoo News, Topix does more than search news and blogs. It sifts and sorts all of this content into distinct topical pages. In addition, Topix recently added some killer features that make it even more invaluable. You can view a full year's worth of blog and news results and track trends with charts too. Here's a round-up of my favorite tips. (Footnote: Topix was a client of mine in my last gig, but I have no affiliation with them today.)

1) Track the Big Memes of the Day
Memeorandum and Tailrank are good tools for tracking the blog issues du jour, but did you know that Topix has its own memetracker? What I like about it is that it's broad and it can be sorted by date, not just by size of story.

2) Deep Dive Within a Single Blog or News Site
Topix tracks a smaller universe of blogs than say Technorati or Google Blog Search. They tend to focus on the larger ones. However, using the site you can create a very narrow search for the terms you care about. Even better, the search will generate a feed. So, if you only care when TechCrunch writes about digg and Netscape, you can create a feed that will deliver only these results. You can also create a similar search within a single news source. For example, here's an index of all Google mentions in the Washington Post over the last year. This search too generates a feed and a chart that you can drill down by date.

3) Get the Local Angle on a Story
All news is local right? So, naturally, you might want to know how a story is playing out in your neck of the woods. Using Topix's powerful advanced capabilities, you can create a customized local search within a single market. For example, here's all news and blog mentions from Manhattan about the World Trade Center. Or, here's how Iraq is playing out in the Washington, DC area. You can compare it in volume to the coverage in Chicago or Peoria.

4) Track Individual Companies, Celebs or Sports Figures
Topix.net has more than 300,000 category pages. Many of these are invaluable. And remember, each has its own RSS feed. So you can track thousands of companies and celebrities, specific movies (even old ones like Mission Impossible), individual baseball or football players and so much more.

5) Pull it All Together with the Ultimate Advanced
Last but not least you can pull these techniques together to your advantage. Let's say I want to track how the Mel Gibson/anti-semitic story ins playing out in the LA Times. Easy. First, I search Topix to find the Mel Gibson page. I copy the end of the URL (who/mel-gibson). Then I browse over to Topix's advanced search and set up the following search: jews cat:who/mel-gibson url:latimes.com (see screen grab below). The result, yup, my own customized search and RSS feed. You can chart the coverage over time too.

Comments

[Andy Rutledge]

the problem of using some public tracker like bloglines.com is that their update frequency. I cannot just depend upon the pingshot. Anyway, tracking a lot of information is really painful. Information overload always scare me out of my way.

[Kevin Burton]

You can sort Tailrank by date.

http://tailrank.com/posts/river

You an even sort by date and then change the minimum ranking for posts.

[Rob]

I'm finding it hard to create these specific feeds. My RSS feed just subscribes me to Topix generally rather than the specific feed I'd like to create. Does any charitable person have a clue what I'm doing wrong? Many thanks in advance, Rob

[Easton Ellsworth]

From one hopeless (using the term loosely) info junkie to another, I thank you for this, Steve. I've been intrigued lately by Topix but needed a boost like this to go check it out.

[Deepak]

I second Easton. Exactly what the Dr. ordered.

[Chris Tolles]

Rob:

You subscribe to a particular RSS feed, either by looking at the specific page on Topix.net that you are interested in (say, your ZIP code), or by getting a feed of the specific search that you're doing. Advanced search can restrict by source, for example.

The RSS button on the bottom of the page will get you the feed of anything you are looking at on Topix.net's news

[Marta]

Did you hear about Newstin.com? I really like it.