If you're looking to brainstorm ideas for new content then a good place to start is by monitoring trending topics online. If you want to capture the attention of a larger audience, writing a blog post about a popular trending topic can give your website a huge traffic boost.

Incredibly, most of the tools for monitoring online trends are free and easily accessible to anyone. As more data is made available for monitoring online activity in real-time, the Internet is changing how companies research new trends and is even allowing some innovative companies to use search trends to predict the future. From monitoring popular search trends on Google to trending topics on Twitter, Youtube, Wikipedia and Facebook, if there's a groundswell of interest in a topic online, then there is a tool to easily monitor it. Here are 10 of the best tools I've come across for online trend monitoring.

1. Google Trends

   Google Trends is a useful tool for monitoring search-related trends. It basically provides a graph showing how search keywords are trending over time, connecting trend spikes with important news items and breaking the data down into regions, cities and even languages. To see the latest hot trends, you will want to view Google's Hot Trends for Search.

2. Google Insights For Search

   This is another tool provide by Google that I find even more useful than Google Trends. Google Insights for Search provides all the features of Google Trends but also displays related search terms, rising searches and regional interest in the keywords across the world.

3. NowRelevant

   NowRelevant is a new search engine that shows you everything on a subject that has been mentioned on the web in the last two weeks. It provides a handy slider where you can choose only how many days back in time you want to search. If you're looking for specific company brand mentioned in the blogsphere, I have also found Trendpedia to be an excellent tool.

4. Twitter Trending Topics

   Twitter's trending topics provides a window into what people are talking about right now on the real-time web. It allows you to search for keywords and see what topics are trending related to those keywords. If you want to monitor popular content on Twitter today, I recommend Tweet Meme. To see real-time trends charts for Twitter What The Trend is excellent tool, providing useful user-generated descriptions of why something is trending.

5. News Map

   For trending topics in the news media, News Map is an ingenious tool which monitors popular headlines by displaying them on their frontpage in an eye-catching graphic format. If you want to create a new blog post something related to a trending news topic, this is the tool to use.

6. Magma and Youtube's Trending Videos

   If you are considering using videos to promote your website, you will want to take a look at Youtube's trending topics. Using this tool you can see popular videos currently trending on Youtube. If you want to see popular trending videos across the Internet I recommend Magma, which has an interesting top 100 videos currently trending online.

7. Trending Topics on Wikipedia

   Trending Topics allows you to search for trending topics on Wikipedia. On the frontpage, it ranks the top 25 Wikipedia articles in the past 30 days, as well as the fastest rising articles in the past day.

8. Trends Buzz

   This tool allows you to search across the web for popular trends. On the Trends Buzz homepage, it lists trending topics from Twitter, Wikipedia, Yahoo, Google, New York Times, Wordtracker and more.

9. Collecta Real-Time Search

   Collecta is the web's largest real-time search engine. It tells you in detail what is hot right now on the real-time web. Collecta pulls information from blog posts, websites, Twitter, Flickr, Youtube and 100s of other websites to provide you a clear picture of what is being said about a topic in real-time.

10. OneRiot for the Social Web

    OneRiot is a real-time search engine that allows you to search trending topics across Twitter, Facebook, Myspace and Digg. If you're looking for topics trending on Facebook this is probably the best tool you're going to find. Previously, there was Facebook Lexicon, which was mysterious removed in February 2010 "for the time being" - only 4 months after its initial launch.

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