These days it seems like you can find a study or survey to demonstrate just about anything...whatever you happen to believe in.

That's especially true in a Presidential election year in the United States. Every news cast seems to be reporting the war of the polls, supposedly predicting election results based on telephoning a few hundred or a few thousand individuals. And who knows how much bias is built into the questions in these polls?

With that in mind, sometimes it is worthwhile to take a look at unfiltered data.

Recently I've been experimenting with the Trend tool over at BlogPulse. I performed my own "poll" of sorts, to see what the talk was in the blogs about small business and three issues: health care, taxes and outsourcing. Here is the Trend chart:

The Trend chart shows that the blogs are talking mostly about taxes (the green line) in connection with small business, suggesting taxes are of greatest interest to small businesses among the three subjects. Next comes health care (in yellow). Of far less interest for small business is outsourcing (in blue). Based on this data you can form your own opinions as to which candidate you think scores better in the area of taxes for small business.

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Adapted from a post that first appeared on the author's weblog, Small Business Trends.

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