BlogPulse Relaunches
A few years ago, I started working at Nielsen Buzzmetrics which eventually became Nielsen Online. I remember the first days there being so full of enthusiasm and pride in working for such a cool innovative company. One of the coolest things, I remember about Buzz back then was BlogPulse the free blog indexing tool that was built a few years prior.
It has so many cool innovative tools to help in trending everything from popular blogs to topics of conversation amongst those blogs. I would look at BlogPulse and immediately know the days news and how folks felt about that news. In a sense, it was and still is a quick glance at the collective ideas of the online world. Its really quite fascinating and I was proud to be a part of the team.
As things go, I moved on from Nielsen to Microsoft and BlogPulse faded into the back of my mind only to be visited rarely. So you can imagine my excitement when I read via Twitter that BlogPulse had relaunched. My mind immediately wondered what cool new tools would be in store for BlogPulse in this incarnation. Would it remain the innovative tool that it was? Would I start visiting more frequently to use these tools in new and wonderful ways?
More than 3 years in the making BlogPulse has a new skin and its much cleaner design than the old one. I appreciate the efforts that were put into making it much easier to find and sort through the mountains of information that are digested daily through BlogPulse. The design is really nice. One thing about the design that I found peculiar was the lack of obvious linking back to Nielsen the parent company of the tool other than a small link in the footer of the page. I see the big logo in the upper right but its not clickable as a link. If this was to avoid obvious marketing by Nielsen than I definitely applaud it.
The other area that I found particularly strange was that other than calling out a few trends in a new upper left hand box the site offers no particular innovations. Essentially its a new skin on an old site that took a number of years to complete. I would have really enjoyed seeing Nielsen bring some new tools to the site or a blog that explained the changes and brought a personal spin to it. In a world, of AJAX and Javascript that would have enhanced trending tools Nielsen really could have pushed this to the next level. Instead its really the same BlogPulse with new clothes.
In any event, cheers to Nielsen for modernizing the design and helping me to remember BlogPulse and its cool tools. Hopefully in the next incarnation we will see some more innovations but for now it looks like we will have to be satisfied with a new look.
