Where to go to find what’s hot on the Web

Real time search has been all the buzz over the past year. As the Social Web gains in momentum the value of real time information is becoming more crystallized. Consumers get a better sense of a company’s value and commitment to their customers, journalism takes on a more personal independent feel and micro-social networks pop up with users passionate about quite narrow topics. Real time search has been one of the keys to accessing this rich new medium. However, today we’d like to look at Real Time Discovery, the idea that sometimes it’s not just about finding what the Web is saying about a popular topic – but actually learning what the newest popular topics are – and that is Real Time Discovery.

So here are 5 sources you should use regularly if you are interested in learning about what topics or keywords are being talked about right now. And if you’d like to know why you might be interested in knowing the hot topics here’s an article that describes it.

Google Trends – This is one of the most commonly sited sources for great trending topics. It is determined by Google analyzing its recent searches and seeing which have had significant increases in volume in the past few hours.

Twitter Trending Topics – Twitter trending topics has become one of the poster children for the pulse of social media. It can often result in terms only the twitter-sphere understands #youknowitslove but it can often be the most rapid to display immediate events.

Yahoo Buzz – with a slightly less niche orientation than Google Trends and more of a focus on overall popularity, Buzz is a great place to see the most popular topic on celebrities, politics and world events.

Bing xRank – similar to Yahoo Buzz, xRank has a very celebrity, politics, world event feel to the topics that often show up but will regularly dip into topics that are new and unheard of. As with Google Trends it’s based on the number of searches that a topic has over the past several hours.

The Real Time Board – now we don’t like to toot our own horn too much but we think that we’ve put together the most complete list anywhere on the web when it comes to popular topics and keywords. Our Real Time Board not only compiles all of the sources above and more but we actually have a proprietary algorithm that assesses how popular they are relative to one another based on blog and twitter mentions and our own surches. All of this with a quick popover summary for any topic on the board. Check it out we think you’ll like it.

So that’s it. A great list of sources you can use to stay on top of the web, on top of the news and be the first in the know at the water cooler when stories break and the social web has it.