seotworank: New content strategies tool: The Gramanator

Saturday, August 6, 2011

New content strategies tool: The Gramanator

Announcing a new tool: The Gramanator

During my MozCon content creation session today, I announced a new tool: The Gramanator.

It is mighty.

It is the Gramanator:

Bow down before it.

What it does

The Gramanator will take any public Google Reader Shared Feed and:

Clean it up, removing stop words.
Assemble all of the different feed items in the feed into a single ‘corpus’ or index.
Pull out the top 20-30 terms in that corpus and show frequency.
Retrieve the top 20-30 bigrams (two word phrases) and trigrams (three word phrases) from the corpus.

Why it’s useful

You can use Google Reader to assemble lots of different RSS feeds—from Google Alerts, Twitter, sites like Hacker News and other sources—into a single aggregated feed. See the e-book I wrote about this a while ago for more information.

Once all that stuff is together in one aggregate feed, you can mine that text for all kinds of useful information. Here’s an example where I pulled the 2- and 3-word phrases from an aggregate RSS feed I assembled about the debt ceiling crisis:

I haven't seen the news today, but I'm guessing from the noise that the stock market fell about 200 points. Things don't sound too optimistic, either, with phrases like 'dour tone' popping up.

That report is great brainstorming fodder, if you’re looking for writing ideas. It can also help you figure out trending topics, if you run it regularly.

More information coming soon

I’m working on a longer blog post for tomorrow that will outline my presentation at MozCon. That will explain a lot more about why this tool is useful, and how to use it. For now, I wanted to make sure I got the link up for folks who want to have a look.

Enjoy!

The Gramanator – free, no signup required.