Yesterday, I posted my 2000th post on Cre8asite Forums where I moderate. The post was about writing tools (again!) but this time with a twist: the tool is released under a BSD license, meaning it can be downloaded and used as you see fit. The project, called Open Keyword, is a keyword generation tool for SEO purposes.

Open Keyword has two components:

• A keyword searching tool that gets related keywords from Google Suggest, Yahoo! Live Search, and Yahoo Related Search.
• A keyword scraping tool that gets the list of keywords given by Google Trends Hot List that's updated hourly. These keywords are stored into a database and retrieved by the search script.

There are two key things about Open Keyword that make it unique:

• You run it yourself, meaning you can customize the code, for example to alert you when a keyword has become popular. Also, no one will be able to log your keyword research activity (as would happen if you use tools on other sites) and because you have the data, you can do funky custom analysis yourself.
• Because of the data sources, you know the keywords are the most popular according to the search engines. As such, they can be used as seeds for further keyword research to build up the keyword list.

And since Open Keyword is open source, anyone can write improvements. If you do, please share them with me and I'll incorporate them so that everyone benefits.

So all you have to do now is go to the Open Keyword home page and download it. Full instructions on setting it up are also on the page. And if you get stuck gimme a shout. Comments and thoughts below please