Google has released a new tool that helps you to do so, to quickly get an overview about what currently are hot topics that people are highly interested in:

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com

It’s pretty cool, because you can visually go through all kinds of news messages from different sites (like BBC, New York Times, WSJ, and so on), and you actually get to see snapshots of hot topics.

Check it out:

http://fastflip.googlelabs.com/

Have you ever heard of “project echelon”? It’s a favourite of conspiracy theorists, and it says that the government has a system that up that monitors every phone call made on earth and filters out certain words automatically (like “bomb”, etc.).

I am pretty sure that some Big Brother is actually watching us – but with this list of Web2.0 monitoring tools, you can set up your own “Echelon” of the social media landscape. Every time somebody talks about you, or your subject of expertise, you will get notified if you want to.

Now, be aware – you can easily make yourself crazy and stop any progress you’re making in your business by listening to all these conversations. You really don’t want to become a huge aggregator of everything, because it will just cause information overload. But if you set these things up selectively, and spend about 30 minutes a day just going through your “daily data”, you will have your finger on the pulse of your market better than 99% of the competition in your market.

But keep in mind: the most powerful tool is still Google Alerts.

Wordtracker has put out a new (free) keyword research tool which is currently in beta. It’s the “Keyword questions” tool, and I like it A LOT.

You type in any keyword… and it spits out a list of questions people ask about this particular keyword.

Great!

For example, I just typed in internet marketing, see the list of questions it spit out:

This can be a really great way to shortcut your niche marketing research and “get into the prospects head”. One of the most important things that you need to know about in any market is what questions people have, what information they are looking for. This tool makes it so easy to get a feel for different niche markets with the click of a mousebutton.

Really, really awesome.

Here’s how wordtracker itself describes the new tool:

People often type questions into search engines. Now you can find these questions, answer them and get some great search traffic. You’ll be targeting long tail keywords and providing content that readers want to read and link to. Also try the keyword tool the professional SEO uses. Enter a single or a short keyword to find the questions people are asking in your market (examples: business, diet, car, organic, climate change, obama, mccain).

Keyword Questions, like the new Wordtracker keyword tool, now uses one year’s worth of search data.