Tweetmeme
Guy Kawasaki's blog on American Express had a piece a few days ago, about TweetMeme.
TweetMeme not only tracks popular tweets (here's Alltop's TweetMeme aggregate), it also tracks how many times a post is re-tweeted. Here's why that's interesting:
The Tweetmeme retweet button is more useful than Digg as an indicator of the quality of a link because Digg is about a small number of selected people getting stories onto the Digg home page. The assumption with Tweetmeme is that if you retweet a link, you are telling your followers that it leads to a good site, and you are putting your reputation on the line. If you digg something, you are not risking your reputation nearly as much—if at all.
I plan on adding the TweetMeme button (sample shown here) to my blog tomorrow.
Why? Well, now that I'm using Gigya Socialize for Drupal to push my blog posts out to both Twitter and Facebook, TweetMeme should help me keep track of where they go - at least on Twitter, which I frankly care more about anyway.
Guy's post
UPDATE: as I might have known, as with many things in Drupal - "There's a module for that!".
In this case, the TweetMeme module (surprise!).
Right now, all it does is add the TweetMeme badge to your posts. But it's smart enough to know the Blog posts's URL, as disctinct from the main page URL, so that's handy. You can see it in action at the top right of this post, if you're reading this on the web site.
Later, I'll dig through the project's issues etc. to see if there's plans to add the button to the RSS feed.