Buzzgain

“Zeitgeist” refers to the ethos of an identified group of people, that expresses a particular world view which is prevalent at a particular period of socio-cultural progression.

There are multiple tools to find the current hot trends, topics and discussions on the web including Techmeme, Google Trends and Twitter Search.

There’s one that’s closer to home (your Wordpress blog) and something that’s more of a economic indicator of 3 important items:

1. Your blog’s popularity: More popular your blog the more spam comments are blocked by Akismet. This should be a simple number and a graph. Your mileage may wary, but what I found is that the pageview and unique visitors graphs on your blog is a direct correlation to your askismet spam graph over time.

2. The difference between the time that spam appears on your post from the time you actually posted your blog entry reduces. As your blog gets more popular and your overall number of comments increases, what we found is a reduction in the time between posting and spam appearing.

3. The type and content of your spam comments. This trend is on topics that tell you the state of the market. Over the last few weeks we have noticed a remarkable increase in number of spam related comments in the topic of overall healthcare, medicare bill management and education loans – indicative of the Obama health plan and budget as opposed to your standard Viarga spam ads.

What type of spam comments are you getting? What’s your Akismet catching that’s a trend you have to consider?