Here's a cool tool for getting a conversational perspective on the news. Check out BlogPulse's Conversation Tracker.

Here's how it works: You enter either a search term, or a URL -- say, for one of your stories that seems to be attracting attention and discussion in weblogs. Choose how many direct and indirect inbound links ("max breadth") you wish to display. Then backdate it to when you think the conversation probably started. (The date of your initial posting is a good bet.)

What you get is a threaded display of all the aspects of the resulting online conversation that BlogPulse is able to track. This isn't a complete picture of the online conversation, since BlogPulse doesn't seem to capture blog comments, forum or e-mail list posts, etc. But it does provide an intriguing diversity of views, and shows how the conversation spreads and evolves.

For instance, according to BlogPulse here are the extensive conversational ripples resulting from a Jay Rosen essay I mentioned on June 29, The People Formerly Known as the Audience.

Right now, several news organizations use tools from Technorati and del.icio.us to offer a snapshot of online conversations sparked by their coverage. For example, see the "Who's Blogging" and "Save and Share" sidebar boxes on this story from today's washingtonpost.com. Personally, I would love to see such features augmented with BlogPulse's Conversation Tracker. I think their approach is more meaningful. This kind of tool can help you (and your online audience, if you feed it back to your site somehow) understand and even measure the ripples of influence spreading from your news.

But there are other benefits. Following the online conversation can help savvy journalists identify opportunities for followup coverage. After all, the online conversation is one of the best sources of ahead-of-the-curve leads.

(Thanks to Sue MacDonald of Nielsen BuzzMetrics, which owns BlogPulse, for the tip -- although I've been meaning to mention this cool tool for a while.)