While perusing ProBlogger.net this morning, I ran across an interesting service offered by BlogPulse -- a blogging trend tracker (direct link). After entering search terms and selecting a timeframe (from one to six months), you'll get a graph depicting the percentage of all blog posts that mention the term(s) of interest. Beyond giving you an overall plot, you can also click on individual dates to drill down into a listing of the actual posts that mentioned the term of interest on that day. So what does this tell us about personal finance blogging?

Here's what the results for 'personal finance' look like:

After flatlining early on, it appears that things started to heat up in early April, and have really taken off since the beginning of May. Note that this graph is expressed in percentages. Thus, the increase isn't simply a byproduct of increased blogging in general. Rather, personal finance blog entries seem to be proliferating at an accelerated rate.

Just to see how real these sorts of trends are, I punched in 'baseball' and looked at the plot over the past six months. Sure enough, there's a major flurry of activity starting in early April, which corresponds to the beginning of the season. Similarly, check out the plots for 'spring break' or 'graduation.' Pretty cool stuff.

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"Personal Finance Blogging Takes Off" was first published at fivecentnickel.com