BlogPulse is a window into the blogosphere…open it daily to discover the people, issues, blogs, posts, commentaries, tidbits and news that bloggers are discussing.  Link >>

Intelliseek has launched a new tool designed to help marketers track the pulse of the blogging community.

BlogPulse offers a blog search, and a trend search—which plots the amount of activity around a certain phrase over time. 

A conversation tracker pulls related posts from unrelated blogs into a chronological discussion thread.

A Profiles tool returns information about a specific blog - a rank, post frequency, and a rank trend.  Evidently Boyink.com is too low profile of a blog to be included - yet. 

Usefulness of this tool is going to depend on who uses it and for what.  For example, it works well for me if I type in “Boyink” - since it’s an unusual word (and I’m the only blogging Boyink) I can easily find other blogs that reference mine.

But a search for “Aeron” (an office chair manufactured locally by Herman Miller) reveals a weakness in trying to distinguish blogs from other sites on the web. 

No - Intelliseek doesn’t have a flaw in their tool, the issue is that spammers and other “less than ideal” entities have started using blogs as a way to increase web traffic and make money from Google Adwords, etc. 

Here’s an example.  “Elite Office Chairs” is a blog with a catch phrase: “Get comfy and be in style...”.  But note that the site has no human feel to it at all—no names, no “contact us”, no “about us”, and all comments are closed. 

The content appears to be nothing but news stories and CraigsList.com posts that contain the phrase “office chair”. 

Digging around a bit, the blog is part of a bigger (but still useless) site featuring articles, a directory, and an “Office Chairs” newsletter.

The registration information on the domain (which would normally tell you who owns the site) has been masked.

All in all, it’s obvious that this site is a collection of automated tools aggregating content using the “office chairs” keywords in an attempt to gain web traffic and clickthroughs on the Google Ads.

But because it uses blogging tools, it gets pulled into blog analitical tools like BlogPulse, and makes any analysis results suspect.