We had the Daypop 40, and Blogdex, and then PopDex came along. You thought it was over, and people would be content with all this, right?

Wrong. Welcome to BlogPulse - Automated Trend Discovery for Weblogs:

BlogPulse Key Phrases and BlogPulse Key People are mined daily from new entries in over 40,000 weblogs using machine learning algorithms and natural language processing techniques. BlogPulse Top Links are the most popular links appearing in weblogs today.

And guess what? This is a project by Intelliseek, a company with investors like Nokia, Lycos, Ford and Chrysalis. [note to self: start a blog company, that's where the money really is.]

While BlogPulse adds semantic concepts via NLP, BreakingBlogs apparently adds geographical and temporal information using Geo markup to its analysis.

Although this wave of projects shows that people are enthusiastic about the meta-blogging area and are investing time and money into it, I don't quite like the idea of having 20-30 robots reading my blog every few hours.

In addition, I feel these projects, and every addition to the existing list, depreciates the overall usefullness of these tools. People are going to be blogging off these lists, resulting in statistically incorrect reporting for all these tools. So if people read Salam Pax is #1 on Blogdex, they blog about it and it becomes #1 on Popdex as well. What's interesting is that both Blogdex and Popdex might be scouring these blogs as well.

And it's not over yet. I know of atleast one project involving human assisted, full context-based indexing of blogs, whose output is a blog itself. Then we will have blogs about stuff, blogs that blog about blogs blogging about stuff, and blog charts that blog about them.

And they told me blogging was so simple...