Brizzly has acquired WikiRank to create a trending topics guide using a wiki-format.  Brizzly was created by the team that put together Google Reader.  Each Twitter trending topic will get their own page that will be permanent.  Brizzly users will be able to edit the pages and add content to them.  WikiRank will be integrated into Brizzly soon. [VentureBeat]

The team at Small Batch Inc. is back at it again.  During election season, the company put together a Twitter Election tracking website.  About one night after the team built the site, they stumbled upon a repository of Wikipedia server logs.  There were gigabytes of data available about what was being searched for on Wikipedia.

Using the data, Small Batch put together a service called Wikirank.  Wikirank is a way to track what is popular on Wikipedia.  Currently the most read Wikipedia pages in the last 30 days were The Beatles, Watchmen, Natasha Richardson, YouTube, Deaths in 2009, Saint Patrick’s Day, Twitter, Rihanna, Lost (TV Series), and Slumdog Millionaire.

In the blog post that was written about the new service, Jeff Veen wrote about how it is interesting when big news stories take place, there are dramatic spikes in places that did not exist before.  For example, the Hudson River airplane emergency landing had a page created within minutes.  Over the next two days, that was one of the most popular pages on Wikipedia.

The website also has a feature called Trending Topics that displays the percentage increase that certain pages have on a single day.  I highly recommend checking it out on a daily basis out of time pass and just to stay informed.