EQUTE — A new site aims to spot what news stories people are talking about on social media in real time.

Thoora is taking aim at Digg and other news aggregators — it’s interesting, but I don’t know if it will give them a run for their money.

Thoora looks like it wants to combine Digg and Google Trends, which is a great idea, but in practice, it needs some work. The great things it does do is cut the fat from both Digg and Google Trends.

Since it scours blogs and twitter on its own, there is less likelihood that just ridiculous stories stay at the top spot all day. For instance, at the time of this writing a story about John Stamos being drunk was number one — and the 10 poorest cities was number one in US news. From Google Trends, Apple earnings was number one and in Google News it was a story about Afghanistan.

The number one story on Thoora was about a British soccer manager who is in some hot water. It’s not interesting to most of the US audience, but it’s something that has people blogging.

This site could be most interesting to Twitter users looking to make sense of the trends. Once the Twitter spammers are running with the next trend, it can often be hard to find legitimate source for the news.

It’s interesting to get the overview, but to really be a competitor both to dig and Google Trends, Thoora needs more stats and trends. For instance, this neat little activity graph doesn’t have any numbers or days or much of anything stat wise. Demographically speaking, I want to see who is interested, where they are and when they are active. I want to see a breakout story button so I can see the new big news or growing news immediately.

It’s not the be-all-end-all of news trends yet, but it could be interesting to use as a measure of people’s interests and could keep the news reader from wasting time on Google Trends, Digg and Twitter all day.

Thoora is still in beta, so perhaps there is more to come from what could be a really interesting news site alternative for social media junkies.

EQUTE — Judging when your key search terms will come up just got a lot easier with Google Insights.

Google has gotten into the prognostication business with its new Trends tool. They have a quite exhaustive research paper on the topic for anyone who really likes math and graphs. But it boils down to Google using past results and search patterns to determine what people will be searching for in the coming months and years.

Marketers can use the tool as a good way to see what kind of keywords and ads they want to run in the future. For example, pretend we have a Minnesota gardening company staffed with gardeners and stocked with all the gardening tools for a hobbyist.

Google Insights Graph

With Google Insight, it’s easy to see that gardening searches skyrockets in April — one doesn’t even need Google to tell them people are interested in gardening in the spring, but what Insights does well is tell us how the searches have changed. Sure gardening searches will jump in April, but Insights can give us insight into what marketers should be targeting with their articles, keywords and ads.

Google Insights Graph

For instance, this graph shows the search results for gardener. While it’s a subset of gardening and a key part of that gardening business, it seems the grim economy has more people doing their gardening on their own. But insight also gives nice related searches below, vegetable gardening, for example, is up 110 percent from the same time last year and flower gardening has dropped somewhat.

Google Insights Graph

This is where Insight needs some real knowledge to back it up since it’s formula doesn’t factor in other societal issues such as the bad economy. Perhaps Google is predicting the economy will bounce back in 2010 and people will give up on their victory gardens. That’s unlikely, but it still shows when growing veggies will be a popular thing to search for.

All this can really help bring customers to the store or to the Web site efficiently. Marketers can tone down their gardening adds in the winter and get their SEO friendly articles ready for next season. Especially in a down economy, it’s crucial to get some baring on where search will be going. Businesses can tailor their entire business plan to fall in line with how people will soon behave.

For instance, the gardening company could put out articles offering vegetable gardening tips instead of flower gardening tips and put off hiring new gardeners or serve ads that offer the cheapest gardening.

Maybe the gardening shop can serve ads offering a class taught by those gardeners with nothing to do. A “grow your own veggies class” at the store could burn up the local search ads and bring people to the store.

While it’s not a be-all-end all forecasting tool, Google Insight does give a good visual representation of how search volumes will stack up in the future, giving physical stores and online advertisers another piece of their game plan.