I noticed a review in Social Media Today on Searching blog trends which highlights a new Blog Trend Analysis tool - Trendpedia. 

"….Now from Belgian brand monitoring firm Attentio comes Trendpedia - a tool to search blog trends with a bit of zeitgeist thrown in as well.  (Now available out of beta.)"

I ran a comparison in Trendpedia of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John McCain (see below) 

I do like how each entity has it's own tab - I can select any point in time in the chart and get a rundown of what I'm comparing and giving me the pie chart on the right.

What I'd also like is an attempt at Sentiment Analysis (positive vs. negative).

The Blogpulse chart isn't quite the same, you get percentages on the Y axis, instead of the actual number of posts considered.  The overall results don't appear to be all that different.

Personally, I'd like more than an improved interface, such as the sentiment analysis from Trendpedia - it doesn't have to be super high tech, what people are paying a lot of money for - but something more than what we can get now.

However, I will play with Trendpedia more, as I do like the interface.