Internet News

A Twitter Year

'Twitter' top word of 2009 by Don Reisinger, Webware (Nov 30)

2009 has been the year of Twitter. Any bets that it will be on the Time cover?

"According to the Global Language Monitor, which examines language usage across the world, "Twitter" beat out "Obama," "H1N1," "stimulus," and "vampire" to take the crown. Interestingly, "2.0" came in at sixth place."

Twitter Study

Twitter: It Really is All About You, Sharon Gaudin, Computerworld via PC World (Oct 3)

New study of tweets shows once again that Twitterers aren't talking about anything important - their tweets are mainly about themselves. But some (about 20%) do post informational messages - these people "tend to have larger social networks and interact more with their followers."

There is also potential for more serious or intentional use of twittering.
"Astronauts used Twitter to communicate from space, tweets have been issued from the White House, and Twitter turned into something of a lifeline for the people of Iran during the recent government crackdown over disputed elections there."

Twellow Directory to Twitterers

Find Twitter users through Twellow. This is a yellow-pages directory of public Twitter accounts. Find the people and their tweets and then follow them. You can browse by category or select from profiles. Twellowhood will help find ones near you.

Searching Blogs

How to search blogs for what you want by Wendy Boswell, WebSearch About.com (Aug 21)

Has tips and tool for searching blogs. Google Blog Search, Technorati, and suprisingly, Twitter through a Twitter search tool are the big three.

Twitter Babble

Study: Twitter is 40 percent 'pointless babble' by Caroline McCarthy, Webware (Aug 14)

Can't imagine that anyone will be surprised by this.

"A full 40.5 percent of posts on Twitter--or tweets, as they're called--can be classified as "pointless babble," according to a new study from Pear Analytics. Coming in second was "conversational," which the company says makes up 37.55 of all tweets."

News was 3.6%

More microblogging

5 Microblogging Sites That Aren’t Twitter by Michael Gray, Searchengineland (Aug 11)

Twitter isn't the only microblogging service. You could also be blogging and reading Posterous, FriendFeed, Tumblr, Dailybooth, 12 Seconds.

Who is this most important to: the microbloggers who need to stay connected every second of the hour, or the advertisers who want to sell them something and get into the radar?

5 Microblogging Sites That Aren’t Twitter by Michael Gray, Searchengineland (Aug 11)

Twitter isn't the only microblogging service. You could also be blogging and reading Posterous, FriendFeed, Tumblr, Dailybooth, 12 Seconds.

Who is this most important to: the microbloggers sharing every second, or the advertisers?

!0 Questions about Twitter

Ten Things You Need to Know About Twitter by Nancy Davis Kno, Information Today (June) via Allbusiness.com

+ Who uses
+ What you can find
+ Why are people using it
+ What do the fail whale and other twitter codes mean
+ How is Twitter different from social networks
+ What applications exist to leverage Twitter
+ Does Twitter make money
+ How do I decide who to follow on Twitter
+ Why is Twitter making Facebook nervous
+ What about compliance

Blogging and Tweeting

Blogging: Past, Present, and Future, video at Businessweek.com [about 6 min]

"Ten years ago, you probably hadn't heard of blogging. Now, millions do it every day. BusinessWeek's Stephen Baker chats with Rosenberg about where all this is heading."

Scott Rosenberg author of "Say Everything" talks about blogging and people putting their lives on the Web. Twitter is a blogging extention and recommended for the little bits, and longre thoughts are for blogs.

Also Why Does Twitter Matter? by Bruce Nussbaum - recommending that Secretary of State Hillary Rodham attend to twittering for the social protest that it expresses today.

Yahoo 360 to Close

Yahoo 360 to close on July 13, by Dong Ngo, Webware (May 29)

First Yahoo closed GeoCities, throwing people who used that space for web sites out of a home. Now there is news that it is closing Yahoo 360, a social centre for blogs, again forcing users to move on - this time into a "new Yahoo profile".

"After almost two years without providing any support, Yahoo has finally decided to shut down its blog-centric social Web site Yahoo 360 Degrees completely on July 13. During its more than four years of existence, the site has never actually been out of the beta stage."

What's really going on in Yahoo?

Google's Blog Clustering Algorithms

Quietly, Google Updates Its Blog Search Algorithm, by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (May 15)

Google has said it is improving the Blog Search - "One of the algorithmic changes is aimed at making sure the home page clusters reward the freshest and most authoritative blog content. Within any cluster, Google wants to find the posts that people are talking about the most."

Claim: "“With [Thursday's] update,” Hylton says, “the whole collection of ranking changes provides a more authoritative set of results. I think it’s really a great set of bloggers talking about current events.”"

Twazzup for more Twitter

Twazzup: New All-In-One Twitter Search Engine, by Matt McGee, Search Engine Land (Apr 14)

I hesitate to give space to yet another twitter search engine - "<b>Twazzup takes everything Twitter has to offer — noise and all — and lets users find what interests them most."

Twitter Search Tips

Twitter search is broken by Rafe Needleman, Webware (Apr 10)

If you search Twitter for buzz or latest news / reports from the street, you'll want to read these twitter search tips and references to tools.

"You can't discount the importance of timeliness, since Twitter Search is unparalleled at taking the pulse of the Web moment-to-moment. But as a research tool it needs more finesse. And while I realize that adding features like these (as options, please) would undermine the brutal simplicity of Twitter Search, they'd also make it more useful. "

Twitter Tools

TweetDeck gets new features, fixes by Rafe Needleman, Webware (Apr 9)

Twitter users are probably benefitting from the competition Tweetdeck and Twhirl.

"The popular multicolumn Twitter client TweetDeck got some serious competition last night, when Twhirl publisher Seesmic launched Seesmic Desktop, a direct competitor. But this morning TweetDeck shot back with a new version that addresses some of the issues the Seesmic said it was winning on. "

Will Google index Tweets?

Twitter ‘the target of Google search’, The Sunday Times (Apr 5)

Maybe a takeover isn't in the cards, but Google does want a real-time feed of Twitter updates. Hmm - I'm not certain I want Tweets in search results.

Of interest:

"Twitter now has more than 6m users posting updates each month. Users post their opinions to friends and followers on anything from politics to the weather.

The searchable information is a gold mine for marketeers, but Twitter, while well funded, has so far not disclosed how it intends to make a profit. "

Microblogging Plan

I'll Be Blogging Less, So Please Follow Me on Twitter by Andrew Goodman, Traffick.com (Feb 27)

Interesting post in which Andrew Goodman, a fairly regular blogger, describes his plan to get control over his blogging time by switching to Twitter.

"But my hope is that blogging less and tweeting more will save time and also put me in touch with the thoughts of a highly select group of people who can help me think faster (and have fun doing it)."

But, if he follows all his interests, he'll be blogging more.

For now he'll be at http://twitter.com/andrew_goodman

Reasons to Search Blogs

Google Still Working On Making Blog Search More Relevant by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Feb 27)

Everyone is hoping that Google Blog Search will repair damage from a few months ago that followed their new news-like design. Of interest, Barry Schwartz explains why blog searching matters to him:

+ "find relevant and fresh blogs with content on topics that I am looking for"

+ "often track who is linking to the articles I write. This way I can see what people are saying about my stories and help clarify my stories when necessary"

" "also use the link operator to find out who is linking to my stories on either Search Engine Land or the Search Engine Roundtable"

Three good reasons.

A Look at Google Blog Search

What I Learned About Google Blog Search at SMX West by Matt McGee, Small Business Search Marketing (Feb 25)

The workings of Google Blog Search explained: placement, timing, authority - the clusters - and when will blog entries turn up in universal search (probably when they are "hot")

Google BlogSearch Examined

Google Throttles Blog Search Indexing by Michael Martinez, SEO-Theory (Feb 12)

Michael Martinez ran a few searches to show to Google that its BlogSearch servce is seriously impaired possibly because they added a page-ranked-based filter.

"Google relaunched its Blogsearch service in October with a format similar to that of Google News Search. It appears to me that Google has sacrificed the quality of its index for the sake of being able to replicate a DIGG-like functionality for its default Blogsearch results. Marshall Kirkpatrick compared it to Techmeme at Read Write Web."

Google responded to the blog posting to explain some of the results - not entirely to Michael Martinez's satisfaction.

So - if you use Google's BlogSearch, be aware that there are shortcomings. You also have to like its new Google-News look with topic breakdown and aggregated stories.

Twitter, Clickjacking, TinyURL

Twitter security: There's still a lot of work to do by Don Reisinger, Webware (Feb 12)

New term - clickjacking - and that's what malware artists do in twitter.

"There are two potential security issues currently plaguing the popular social network: the popular use of link shorteners like TinyURL that lead users to unknown destinations, and a single login system that some hope will be fixed with the arrival of OAuth."

Interesting especially for what he says about using TinyURL's preview feature. "TinyURL's preview feature doesn't require registration and instead asks to place a cookie on your machine. Once you surf to the company's preview page, it asks if you want to enable a TinyURL preview. If so, you only need to click the link on the site and from that moment forward, any TinyURL link you click in Twitter or elsewhere across the Web won't immediately send you to the destination site. Instead, you will be redirected to a TinyURL preview page that allows you to examine the link and decide if you want to go to the respective page."

Search Engines for Blogs

The State of Blog Search, 2009 by Marshall Kirkpatrick, Read Write Web (Jan 29)

Offers a decision tree to match need to blog search engine. Blog search hasn't changed very much in the last 2 or 3 years. The same players ae here: Google Blog Search, Technorati, Ask BlogSearch (owns Bloglines), and IceRocket. FriendFeed is also listed for blog search though it does much more social media searching. Kirkpatrick gives pros and cons of each.

Google Blog Search Poor on Backwards Link Search

Google Blog Search loses its bearings by Scott Rosenberg, wordyard (Dec 12)

Google Blog Search no longer works well for showing links to blogs. Now it includes all kinds of links - new and static.

"Apparently Google Blog Search used to index only the content in the blog’s RSS feed, but now indexes the whole web page. Hylton says Google ” may have underestimated the impact on searches using the link: operator or where the query matches a blog or blogger’s name.” Since (for instance) every installation of Wordpress uses such a search this is not a minor issue; it is, for many of us, the central use of the service."

Analyzing the Blogosphere through BlogScope

University of Toronto has developed a tool for analyzing blog posts. Blogscope (blogscope.net) describes itself as "an analysis and visualization tool for blogosphere ". It claims to track over 30.80 million blogs with 541.71 million posts.

For a search, it will provide:

+ popularity curves showing results by time periods with bursts of interest. The "curve" (actually a bar chart) shows how often the term is mentioned in the blogosphere.

+ related terms taken from the posts.

+ icon to show country of origin, and popup display of the posting.

+ ranking options for relevancy and recency

+ geosearch - show occurrence of postings across the world with the search term (not clickable yet).

It is certainly worldwide - foreign language postings come up frequently (would be good to be able to limit by language).

I was disappointed on my search for searchwiki that prominent technology blogs in the US did not come up. Analysis was interesting but would have been much better had it included TechCrunch, SearchEngineLand and a slew of blogs from and about Google.

BlogScope also offers widgets to be added to individual blogs for a summary cloud, popularity curve, and comparison curve.

BlogScope is in beta - watch for new developments. There is a short demo video

Thanks to KM who pays more attention to the University of Toronto alumni magazine than I do.

Changes at Google Reader

Google Reader gets a cleaner, minimalist look by Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Dec 4)

Google Reader is undergoing change - supposedly to simplify - but will it make it easier for the user?

+ new look that has less "visual clutter" - softer colours.
+ new navigation - "enclosures" - collapse sections - seems to be current styling in many places including iGoogle
+ automation of feed bundles - algorithmic grouping of feeds - you don't have to go out and fnd them individually.

Google Blog Search Indexes Full Posting

Google Blog Search: Now With Full-Text Post Indexing by Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Dec 4)

Google Blog Search now indexes the complete blog post, not just the portion that gets into the RSS feed from a blog.

Article has other news about the new grouping that Google does on the main page.

Google Reader Translates

Google Reader Now Translating Your Subscriptions by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Nov 11)

With Google Reader you can now subscribe to feeds in a foreign language and have it translated.

Google Blog Search uses backwards links

Google Blog Search Now Reads Links on Web Pages at digital inspiration (Oct 31)

Google Blog Search uses link: (the backwards search as I call it) to pick up web articles that link to a web address you search on.

"If your search query resembles a web address (URL), Google Blog Search automatically uses the link: operator and shows list of blogs that have earlier linked to the web address mentioned in your query. ... This means that if another blog (abc.com) has linked to your own blog (my.com) from his sidebar, Google will now show abc.com in the results as well when you query for link:my.com."

Also of interest from Nov 2006 - Blog Search vs Web Search: How are they Different ? -- points out good reasons for using a Blog search engine to get information on recent events.

4 for Blog Search

Blog Search Engines : The Complete Overview, by Ann Smarty, Search Engine Journal (Oct 24)

Ann Smarty shows the search strengths of the four blog search engines she considers the best: Google Blog Search, Technorati, Blog Pulse, Blog Lines.

Blog Search Tools

Seven blog news trackers compared by Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Oct 2)

Alternatives to Google Blogsearch:

+ Techmeme
+ Blogrunner
+ Newspond
+ Technorati - front page topics
+ Topix
+ Megite

"All of these platforms offer an easy and convenient way to stay abreast of news from various blogs without having to do the dirty work of maintaining RSS feeds. Each one has its trade-offs though."

Google BlogSearch like Google News

Google News dips into meme tracking for blogsby Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Oct 1)

"... Google updated its blog search tool [Google BlogSearch ] to track news stories as they pop up on various blogs. Like Google News, the company is taking a product that began as something for search and making it a destination of its own."

Google Reader Enhancements

Google Reader gets small but smart organizational tweaks by Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Sept 23)

"Google just released a handful of small updates for its RSS Reader product that continue to improve some of its organizational capabilities. Included in this update is a more pervasive tagging system, international sharing, a timestamp for the last time a feed was crawled, and an alphabetic sorting system for folders and subscriptions."

Google Blog Search

Browse what the world is saying on Blog Search, Google Blog (Oct 1)

Google Blog Search has adopted clusters to help users browse.

"Adapting some of the technology pioneered by Google News, we're now showing categories on the left side of the website and organizing the blog posts within those categories into clusters, which are groupings of posts about the same story or event. Grouping them in clusters lets you see the best posts on a story or get a variety of perspectives. When you look within a cluster, you'll find a collection of the most interesting and recent posts on the topic, along with a timeline graph that shows you how the story is gaining momentum in the blogosphere."

Blogosphere Report

A Report on Blogging by Lisa Barone, Bruce Clay Inc (Sept 23)

Mentions a five-day series on the 2008 State of the Blogosphere at Technorati. There are a few answers to who, what, and why - but includes the rather unbelievable statement that average annual revenue for the blogger is $6,000 and those receiving over 100,000 visitors a month could be raking in $75,000. I don't think so.

Day 5 on brands makes the interesting statement - "More than four in five bloggers post product or brand reviews, and blog about brands they love or hate. " Really - that makes for substance on a blog?

Google Blog Directory

Gadget browses full suite of Google blogs by Stephen Shankland, Webware (Sept 22)

"The company announced late Sunday what amounts to a channel changer for its iGoogle customized home page service, a Google blogs gadget that gives quicker access to the full list of Google blogs. Think of it as special-purpose RSS feed reader. "

Google Blog Directory has the gadget and a list of all Google's blogs about itself.

Guide to Google Blog Reader

The comprehensive guide to using Google Reader by Dave Shaw, Bloggle (Sep 1)

Bloggle presents The comprehensive guide to using Google Reader -- "It is intended to help those new to Google Reader set up and start using RSS for the first time and understand the key features that Google Reader offers. For existing users, this guide should provide you with useful tips and advanced features to help improve your experience of Google Reader."

Blogged.com for finding better blogs and posts

Blogged.com launches human-powered news tracker By Josh Lowensohn, Webware (Jul 2)

Blogged.com -- Read the headlines from the best of the blogs organized topically or do a keyword search on blogs or posts.

"Blogged.com, a site that started off as a ratings-powered blog directory has branched out into new territory this morning. It's now compiling the hottest news headlines by hand. Competing news tracking services like TechMeme, Google News, and BlogRunner use automated systems or a slight mix of automation and editorial choice to categorize news as it happens. Blogged's will be entirely human-driven."

Blogged.com still has a directory

The Book Bench from the New Yorker

Blog Discovery - The Book Bench -- Loose leafs from the New Yorker Books Department - a gift to people who love reading books or find rest and recreation in reading the New Yorker.

From the about page: "We like to think of the book bench as a state of mind, too: a place for considering literary matters great and small—and for occasionally baring our teeth.—Ligaya Mishan"

Blog Readers

Google Reader Slowly Closing on Bloglines Hitwise (May 21)

Google Reader gaining on Bloglines for market share of blog readers.

"A year ago, Bloglines attracted twice the share of US Internet visits compared with Google Reader. The gap has closed to 40% in the week to 17th May 2008. Last week, Bloglines ranked 21st among Blogs and Personal Websites and Google Reader ranked 32nd. A year ago, those site ranked 45th ad 118th. Share of US Internet visits to Bloglines have increased 158% in the past year and visits to Google Reader are up 267%."

Alltop Aggregates the best in blogs

Tap into the SEO hive mind, Pandia Search (Apr 26)

This could save us some time - "Alltop SEO is an all-in-one page where you easily browse through the latest news from all the best SEO blogs. It’s a surefire way to tap into the SEO hive mind."

There are many other aggregations of topics at AllTop. This is a great way to find the best of the best and read them all at one shot.

From the About page: "We help you explore your passions by collecting stories from “all the top” sites on the web. We’ve grouped these collections — ”aggregations” — into individual Alltop sites based on topics such as environment, photography, science, celebrity gossip, fashion, gaming, sports, politics, automobiles, and Macintosh. At each Alltop site, we display the latest five stories from thirty or more sites on a single page — we call this “single-page aggregation.”"

US Financial Blogs

Financial Blogs: The Best of the Bunch by Karyn McCormack, Business Week (Apr 7)

Recommendations for blogs that provide "... the smartest, savviest takes on the markets and the economy" - intended for US investors.

Infographic for Blogosphere

Search Illustrated: Search Benefits Of The Blogosphere Search Engine Land

"This week's infographic describes both the tangible and intangible benefits of engaging with the blogosphere:"

Great graphic on value and uses of blogs.

Time.com - Top Blogs

Time.com's Top 25 Blogs -- the one-page-version ValleyWag (Apr 7)

Top 25 and 5 most overrated. Huffington Post, Lifehacker , Metafilter, TechCrunch on the top 25, Slashdot and Ars Technica (ouch) on the overrated.

Twingly Blog Search - Beta

Twingly Promises Spam-Free Blog Searches Mikael Ricknäs, IDG News Service via PCWorld (Apr 3)

Blog search engine Twingly from Sweden is being built to serve European needs for many languages. The main feature is that it will control spam by maintaining a white list of good blogs. Blogs that link to "bad" blogs will not make it to the white list.

At present it is in beta and for use by invitation only.

Using Technorati for Searching Blogs

March 2008 InfoTip: Mining Technorati, Mary Ellen Bates (Mar)

Search aids and techniques at Technorati - "one of the premier tools for searching blogs".

Mary Ellen Bates writes, "What I have found particularly valuable about Technorati is how I can mine useful data about opinion-leaders in the blogosphere."

Intute Social Science Blog

If, on occasion, you are despondent about the commercialism of the web search engines, or the declining quality of the web directories (Dmoz, Yahoo, others), lift your spirits by visiting Intute, the scholarly directory done by librarians and university staff in the UK.

The four collections - Science and Technology, Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences, and Health and Life Sciences - also have blogs, training suites (self-study guides), a new-resources section, events - and more.

This week the Social Sciences section of Intute is participating in the ESRC Festival of Social Science (March 7 - 16) by featuring a series of articles in the Social Sciences Blog in which its subject editors present their favourite blogs.

The themes will be:

Friday 7th of March: Sociology
Monday 10th of March: Psychology and Law
Tuesday 11th of March: Elections and Statistics / Data
Wednesday 12th of March: Economics and Business / Management
Thursday 13th of March: International Relations and Europe
Friday 14th of March: Politics / Government and Round-up of the week

Microblogging with Twitter

The wonderful Common Craft has done a video about Twitter and microblogging - http://www.commoncraft.com/Twitter

Blogs and Information Overload

Lawyers Crushed by Information Overload by Robert J. Ambrogi, Legal Blog Watch (Feb 27)

Comments on findings from a LexisNexis study on overload especially for lawyers. (Also see Information is Overwhelming , Taxonomy Watch)

Of interest re blogs:

"So where do blogs fit into this problem of information overload? For fanatics such as myself, they clearly exacerbate it. I regularly track hundreds of blogs and spend way too much time sifting for gold among the grit. But if, as the survey says, lawyers want technology tools that are focused, timely and both factual and analytical, then blogs clearly fit the bill, at least those that are devoted to specific practice areas. Yes, blogs can add to information overload, but they can also alleviate it by helping lawyers monitor and sift what is important in their fields. Like technology of all sorts, blogs can be either a blessing or a curse, depending on how you use them."

Blog Search Contestants 1 and 2

Blog Search Revisited - Google vs Technorati vs Techmeme Andy Beard (Feb

Compared blog search at Google and Technorati, and explained why he starts at Techmeme.

Identifies some of the ranking factors at Google: title, order of words in title, keyword occurence in the text, site authority metrics.

He found Technorati fresher and with less spam. Ranking is really according to relevance, rather than the giving the user the ability to define an "authority threshold".

Techmeme has breaking technology stories - it is very fresh but it's not a blog search engine.

Privacy with Google Reader

Keeping It Private On Google Reader Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Dec 27)

Describes how sharing works in Google Reader and how to keep your readings private.

Google Reader for Blogs

Google Reader Adds Recommendations And Drag & Drop by Barry Schwartz, Search Engine Land (Nov 30)

"The Google Reader Blog announced that they have added two new features unique to Google Reader but not unique to many other RSS readers. The new features are "recommendations" and drag and drop capabilities."

Search Engine Land Blogroll

Search Engine Land's Blogroll, Sliced, Diced, & Categorized Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Nov 13)

Search Engine Land has organized its extensive blogroll into about 30 high-level groupings. See the entire blogroll . Wonderful introduction to the entire field. How handy that Search Engine Land is doing the digest for us.

Spam removal in Google Blog Search

Remove Spam from Google Blog Search Google Operating System (Oct 22)

Names two features Google Blog Search has to reduce the number of splogs (spam blogs) from search results.

+ a duplicate filter that removes nearly identical posts (most of the time)
+ option to sort results by relevancy - get the benefit of other weighting factors.

Other ideas:

+ exclude blogspot.com and the .info domaiin because of the amount of spam there
+ exclude Google Alerts because of misuse at blogs.

Google Reader details

Google Reader Now Reporting Subscriber Figures Danny Sullivan, Search Engine Land (Oct 15)

If you use Google Reader you'll be interested to know that it now shows how many readers a blog has within Google's dedicated feed reading service. Sullivan has details and screenshots.

Add Google Presentation to a Blog

How To Embed Google Presentations, Inside Google (Sept 18)

This has to be useful for something - use Google to create the slide presentation and then embed in a blog post.

Google Reader for searching blogs

Google Reader Adds Search & Other Features by Barry Schwartz, Search engine land (Sep 6)

"You can now search your subscriptions, including subscriptions to shared items." - has details. Makes Google Reader as good as Bloglines - it seems.

New Bloglines

Bloglines Version 3.0 Beta Now Available to the Public, ResourceShelf (Aug 27)

Bloglines, a web-based blog reader and rss aggregator, has new features.

"New: Bloglines Beta, V.3 -- Bloglines* has just gone public a new beta release (available for Firefox and IE 7 browsers) with a bunch of new features, with more to come."

100 Blogs

100 Blogs We Love Favourites from the blogosphere "covering everything from high tech to low comedy and all manner of pursuits in between" from the Editors of PC World (June 25)

Authority at Technorati

Technorati includes "Authority" ranking of blogs, SEW Blog (May 6)

Not just links, but authority for blog search at Technorati - ""Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.""

Ways to Blog

How to Feed the Blog Beast, by Amy Gahran, Poynter Online (Apr 18) - Gahran has some ideas on ways to use a blog. She wrote this for journalists, but the ideas are good for anyone who is trying to stay on top of a topic. I like "blog as a notepad" - which is what I'm doing right now.

Bloggers' Code

Code of conduct proposed for blogs, The Scout Report (Apr 13)

This week's topic in The Scout Report is about the call for bloggers to abandon their rude ways and become more civil and polite. Tim O'Reilly and Jimmy Wales (Wikipedia) in the U.S. were the first to speak when they proposed that bloggers adopt a "civility" standard. Many have been responding. The Scout Report has compiled a few links about blogs.

Blog Numbers

The tsunami of blogs may be receding.

Weblog universe divides as expansion slows: study, AFP via Yahoo News (Apr 5)

Figures from Technorati indicate fewer new blogs are being started. Doubling of the blogosphere is by year rather than by half year. Technorati has counted 72 million blogs.

However, the Globe and Mail in Social Studies (Apr 5) quoted a study from Gartner that sees blogging levelling off to 100 million people, but some analysts think it could drop to 30 million. Possibly 200 million blogs have already been abandoned.

More on this in Why are so many people blogging off? by
Emine Saner, Guardian Unlimited (Mar 27)

Librarian Central from Google

Google Librarian newsletter announced the Librarian Central blog - http://librariancentral.blogspot.com/ - add it to your newsreader.

Blogging Software

To begin, type headline here "It's never been easier to call yourself a blogger" Globe and Mail (Mar )

Points out that the easiest way to start blogging is in MySpace or Facebook, but for more control recommends Wordpress.

"The more recent updates to Wordpress, which is continually rolling out improvements, allow bloggers to easily add features — known as "widgets" — to their blogs, including lists of the most-read and most commented-on posts on your blog, tiny music players, video clips, an instant messenger tool that works through the Web browser, a series of your Flickr photos, and so on. Like most other blog tools, you can also add a calendar, a link to the archives of your blog (your previous posts), and the "feed" from various Web services such as del.icio.us."

Of course there is also Google's Blogger.com and SixApart's Typepad, LiveJournal and the new Vox.

Business Blog Directory

Directory of Radio Podcasts Also Offers Directory of Business Blogs, ResearchBuzz (Jan 27)

Here's a directory to business blogs - http://www.iblogbusiness.com. Claims 1,153 business blogs in 313 categories. Can search the posts but not the blog names and descriptions. Has a tab for top-rated but no rating system. Primitive

Weblogs in the Law Office

The Blog - Another Tool in Your Arsenal By Janet Peros, LLRX.com (Jan 15)

"Both information service departments (libraries) and marketing and business development departments in law firms are extensively employing blogs as a vehicle of communication both within the firm and between the firm and its clients. Often used as an alternative to email updates and newsletters, blogs are usually simpler and quicker to update and provide an online archive of searchable information."

Google's Librarian Central

Librarian Central is Google's blog to deliver tips, news and updates to librarians. Pick up the newsletter, tools, stories and videos here too.

IceRocket for Blog Search

IceRocket and Some New (?) Popularity Features, ResearchBuzz (Jan 8)

Tara Calishain prefers IceRocket for blog searching because it is splog free. Now it has some other features - like hottest movies.

Blog Search Engines

The State of Blog Search Engines: Depressing, ResearchBuzz (Dec 30 2006)

Google Blog Search may be the most popular blog search engine but Tara Calishain finds it clogged with spam. She says that there isn't a perfect blog searcher, though she looks to IceRocket and to Blogdigger.

SEO Blogs

Search Engine Journal's 2006 Blog Awards Announces Winners, Searchengineland (Jan 5)

Lists the best of blogs that relate to search engine marketing. Best search blog was Matt Cutts' Gadgets, Google and SEO - has tips and tricks and good technical stuff. But for Search Engine news go to Search Engine Watch blog, Search Engine Roundtable , and, one of my favourites, Google Blogscoped.

Fast Forward 2007 Blog

Fast Forward Blog- A hosted discussion on Enterprise 2.0 -- companion to conference on FastForward 07 -- "The blog's focus, like the conference's: Enterprise 2.0 and how today's companies and individuals are harnessing technology to collaborate, innovate, manage knowledge and much more."

Blog Readers

Google Reader & Ask's Bloglines Undergo Updates by Barry Schwartz, SEW Blog (Sep 29)

"Both Google Reader and Ask.com's Bloglines have gone under some interface and usability updates, with some added features included."

US Political Blogs

Politics and Tech Tools - Blogs, Aggregators, and Tracking Tools, by Laura Gordon-Murnan, Searcher (Oct)

Who would have thought there could be so many blogs following US politics? They are national / local, conservative / liberal, democrat / republican, House / Senate, incumbent / challenger. They are all here along with aggregators, alerting services, podcasting services.

"Ways to track, monitor, and participate in political campaigns have exploded. Dynamic, exciting, and wide open political blogging is playing an active role and has an aggressive voice in shaping political discourse."

Ask.com Smart Answers - Blogs

Ask Has Some New Smart Answers, Courtesy RSS, ResearchBuzz (Sept 20) -- Ask.com will find rss feeds easily on many topics. Tara Calishain gives the example of hurricane warnings where you'll get links to recent posts from the NOAA blog. The results are nicely identified with the blog icon. This will easily find the weblog and related feed from well known and popular blogs such as NOAA's or ResearchBuzz itself (see below), but it's not truly a feed search tool. For that, you'll want to turn to Ask Blogs and Feeds.

There are more examples at ResourceShelf Getting the Info to the End User: Ask.com’s RSS Smart Answers Continue, Not Only Blogs (Sept 21)

Blogging Services

Broadcast yourself with a blog By Elsa Wenzel, CNet (August 25, 2006)

Describes and compares different blogging services: Google's new version of Blogger (still in beta), Google Blogger, Typepad (monthly fee), WIndows Live Spaces, and Yahoo 360 - the last two have social networking components.

Blook - blog + book

Librarians: Are You Ready for Blooks? by Genie Tyburski, Virtual Chase (Aug 24)

Tyburski ahs assembled several articles on the blook. A blook is a book that begins as a blog. A European company has published Tom Reynolds' blog postings about his work as an ambulance worker in London England. The title is Blood, Sweat and Tea and it is being published under a Creative Commons license.

Enhancements to Blogger.com

Google Tests Blogger Upgrade by Juan Carlos Perez, IDG News Service via PC World (Aug 15)

"Google has started testing an enhanced version of its popular Blogger blog publishing service [Blogger.com] , adding long-awaited features such as the ability to categorize entries with labels, to control access to blogs, and to make layout changes by dragging and dropping."

These changes aren't rolled out. Go to https://beta.blogger.com/start to become a beta user.

Blog for Canadian Small Business

Small Biz Unplugged - new Canadian weblog sponsored by D&B Canada. Greg Balanko-Dickson is the chief blogger. Topics are to i"nclude everything a small business owner in Canada would be dealing with", such as "taxes, financing, business planning, expansion, startup, blogging, succession planning, marketing, cash flow management and managing human resources to name a few".

Searching the Blogosphere

Searching for Order in the Blogosphere By Leslie Walker, Washington Post (July 27) -- Overview of the leading blog search sites = Google Blog Search ( http://blogsearch.google.com ), Icerocket ( http://www.icerocket.com ), Feedster ( http://www.feedster.com ) and Technorati ( http://www.technorati.com ) - as well as the new Sphere, which may become the new "Google of the blogosphere".

Technorati ranks results by links to the blogs in the tradition set by Google.

"Sphere, on the other hand, goes a few steps further -- analyzing and giving weight to the actual words in each blog posting, to the length and frequency of posts to a blog, and to how often the individual blogger writes about the subject being queried."

Google Blog Reader

Google has made some changes to its blog reader -- Your wish is our command, Google Blog (Jul 19)

Technorati - new and improved

Technorati turns 3, rolls out a major update, SIfry's Alerts (Jul 24) -- David Sifry guides readers through the new features and updates at Technorati for blog searching.

Of particular interest:

"# We've added in lots of features to help you make sense of the blogosphere, including Discover, which is topic-based, Favorites, which gives YOU the power to pick your favorite blogs, and Popular, which algorithmically derives the most linked-to items in the last few days.
# We've made some big changes to blog profiles - allowing you to get stats about any blog that Technorati tracks, including the tags used, posting frequency, traffic, and Technorati ranking."

Blogging

Bloggers: A portrait of the internet's new storytellers by Amanda Lenhart and Susanna Fox, PEW

There are a lot of bloggers on the Internet and many do it just to talk about their lives. In earlier studies, PEW found that about 12 million American adults have blogs (8% of adult internet users) and 57 million read them (39% of the online population).

Now we learn that they are young (54% under the age of 30), that they blog personal experiences (76%) and in particular their lives (37%), though there are single digit percentages for peopl blogging about politics, technology, sports, a hobby or other interest.

Of interest: ""Blogs are as individual as the people who keep them, but this survey shows that most bloggers are primarily interested in creative, personal expression," said Lenhart. "Blogs make it easy to document individual experiences, share practical knowledge, or just keep in touch with friends and family.""

Top 5 Science Blogs

Fifty Popular Science Blogs - list published by Nature.com. Ranking is from Technorati in July, but Nature.com has an article on the Top Five Science Blogs.

Finding authoritative blog content

Ask.com's Blog & Feed Search Joins the Blogosphere by Barbara Quint, Newsbreaks (June 5)

Reviews have been very good about the new blogsearch from Ask - http://blogsearch.ask.com.

"The relevancy ranking impact of Bloglines could turn out to be a critical advantage for Ask.com's Blog & Feed Search service. Other popular blog search engines have been trying to help searchers reach more authoritative content. For example, Google Blog Search tops the results page with generic recommendations for blogging sites. Yahoo! distinguishes authoritative news blogs by including specific blogs in its Yahoo! News section. Technorati lets bloggers label their blogs with broad categories, while users can sort content by frequency of links by other bloggers or even confine searches to favorite sites. Bloglines is already in position to have that kind of user flow in place on a broad level. Hundreds of thousands of Bloglines users indicate their preferences through searches, subscriptions, clippings, and sharing activities."

Ask.com Blog Search

New Ask.com blog search and Bloglines upgrade (but no new UI), Read/Write Web (May 31)

Sounds like the blog search has become a collaborative social effort - "In essence they're saying that Bloglines users tell the engine what is the best content. Ask.com is also applying their search algorithm on top of the Bloglines subscription data. Users can then filter their results."

The new Ask blog search is at http://www.ask.com/?tool=bls

See review by Chris Sherman, Ask Debuts Blog & Feed Search (June 1) -- "Ask's new blog and feed search offers a high-quality alternative for finding information in the blogosphere, with a number of unique tools not found on competing services."

Comprehensive review by Gary Price -- Ask.com Launches Blog & Feed Search Service - Resourceshelf (June 1)

Corporate Blogging

Blogging: It's Not Just for Self-Expression Anymore -- Trend Has Companies 'Blogging for Dollars', PRNewswire via Marketwatch (May 4)

"It's nothing new to find bloggers, whether intentionally or unintentionally, hogging the top of the rankings on search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and MSN. What is new, however, is that companies large and small are entering the blogosphere in droves, hoping to create that success for themselves."

Laurie Baldwin, CEO of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) firm NetBaldwin has some tips on how to create a successful corporate blog.

Technorati Could Become International

How Culturally Biased Is Technorati?, Fons Tuinstra, Poynter Online (May 3) - Technorati isn't global in its capture of blogs yet, but it has substantially increased its Japanese content and has the potential to bring in other parts of Asia. It all depends on the pinging.

Yahoo Blog Search

Yahoo's Blog Searching: A Couple Hints, ResearchBuzz (Apr 25) - you start at Yahoo News site , run the search, and look for blog results on the right side of the page. Researchbuzz has more tips.

Blog Search at Sphere

Sphere: A New Approach to Blog Search, Chris Sherman, SearchDay (Apr 25)

Looks like there is lots to like in this new search engine for blogs. "Sphere takes a new approach to blog search, looking at three critical variables to understand both individual blog posts and the nature of the blog they appear on."

Sphere is still in beta - check in a week or so.

Blogosphere Overwhelming

Blogosphere Doubles Every Six Months by Enid Burns, ClickZ (Apr 18)

The size and growth rate of the blogosphere is mind boggling.

+ 35.3 million blogs.
+ 75,000 new blogs a day
+ 19.4 million bloggers (55 percent) still maintain their blogs with new posts after three months of blogging.
+ on average, 1.2 million legitimate posts per day, or about 50,000 postings per hour

Figures are from Technorati - "Technorati currently tracks 35.5 million sites and 2.3 billion links through its real-time search engine."

Creative Weblogging

Creative Weblogging is a blog media network - it invites people to be reporters and submit articles for which they are paid a nominal $6 if the article is published. It has slaunched version 2.0 of the citizen reporter tool Creative Reporter at http://www.creative-reporter.com. This is also a community - "With the new version of Creative Reporter, readers at Creative
Weblogging can now decide what's an interesting story. All submitted stories and links can be voted on. Once enough votes and clicks are gathered stories get published at Creative Weblogging blogs".

Creative Weblogging was founded in Germany in 2004 by by Torsten Jacobi and Raik Hoffmann, but is now based in Palo Alto, California. It is very interesting for its list of weblogs in various categories (mainly business oriented) and top 10 picks. Use Creative-Reporter to more easily browse and search the weblogs.

LexisNexis Picks Up Blogs

LexisNexis to Deliver Newstex Blogs on Demand, Newsbreaks (Apr ) -- LexisNexis will pick up blogs from Newstex who licenses content from independent bloggers and tags it with topical categories, company names etc.

Blog Search Practices

A Study of Blog Search by Gilad Mishne Maarten de Rijke, Informatics Institute, University of Amsterdam [pdf] (2006)

"Abstract. We present an analysis of a large blog search engine query log, exploring a number of angles such as query intent, query topics, and user sessions. Our results show that blog searches have different intents than general web searches, suggesting that the primary targets of blog searchers are tracking references to named entities, and locating blogs by theme. In terms of interest areas, blog searchers are, on average, more engaged in technology, entertainment, and politics than web searchers, with a particular interest in current events. The user behavior observed is similar to that in general web search: short sessions with an interest in the first few results only."

Mentioned in ResourceShelf

The Past and Future of Technorati

Case Study: Going Up Against Google, by Michael Fitzgerald, inc magazine (Feb 2006) - The case study is about David Sifry and Technorati , the weblog search engine he started in 2002. The elephant in the field, of course, is Google and the search engine it launched in September 2005.

"Since then, the company has been scrambling to keep its edge by launching new features. First up was a tool that provides constant updates of the things that matter most to people who write and read blogs at any given moment--such as the most-discussed books, movies, and news items on the Web. Then in October, it added a feature that is able to determine who is the most authoritative blogger on any particular topic. In November, a "Mini" search window debuted that automatically refreshes users' favorite searches while they're doing other things online. And in December the company introduced a prototype called Technorati Explore, an experiment in creating a newspaperlike front page from blog posts."

Technorati has been innovative but will it prevail in a market where blog searching may become standard for the search giants?

Readers of inc are adding comments concerning strategic options for Technorati.

Intelligent Agent

Robert Berkman has opened a new blog called Intelligent Agent. This is one of several blogs supported by Information Today. In the opening posting, Bob described its purpose a, "a brand new blog with news, conversation and analysis about business research on the Web, with a special focus on the intersection of business research and Web 2.0." Bob has been using and evaluating online services for many years. His comments are bound to be insightful and his discoveries or recommendations useful. But first it would be a help if they could get the RSS feed from Blogger working.

Blogs can reduce overload

Information Overload: Blogs As Content Navigators, Information Filters, Trusted Niche Guides, by Robin Good (Feb 10) -- Good begins by reviewing the literature about overload, starting with Neil Postman's view that the telegraph was the beginning of bombardment by information. Essentially we are overwhelmed on all fronts. Good suggests that we can reduce overload by using others who are "navigators of information", specifically bloggers.

"They [blogs] cannot compete with the reach of major websites but they can add richness and cater to a micro audiences with narrowly defined needs and who have highly specific interests."

Fortuitously for me, Good gives the iPodLounge (http://www.ilounge.com/) as an example of a specialty source of information that cuts noise and load to something more manageable and useful.

No one who has ever searched Technorati would think that blogs reduce information overload, but people who have found two or three good blogs in their subject area will appreciate the point.

Google Blogs

Google Launched Google Research Blog, SEW Blog (Feb 22)

"Philipp Lenssen located a new Google Blog, at googleresearch.blogspot.com , which will be a blog written by some of the smartest people at Google." Apparently Google has over 100 blogs.

Technorati Blog Search

Filter By Authority is Added to Technorati Search at SEW Blog (Feb 14) - Technorati added an authority slider to help searchers restrict results to weblogs that have many incoming links. The better linked the weblog is, the higher the "authority". The slider appears on the first page of results.

Business Blogs

Fortune 500 Business Blogging Wiki - is a wiki that acts as a directory to blogs being kept by Fortune 500 companies. Also lists other business blogging resources and gives background information about business blogs.

Food Blogs

More cooks say 'blog appétit!' By Jennifer Wolcott, The Christian Science Monitor (Dec 29, 2005) - There are over 3,000 food blogs -- "Besides recipes, some blogs feature restaurant reviews, tips for dining out in Tokyo, cooking with the kids - or how to forage for wild mushrooms".

Article lists 5 blogs to start with and mentions the Food Blog Awards. Learn more about the awards at the Accidental Hedonist.

Top10Sources

Web Surfers Find New Online Destination For Information, Business Wire via Yahoo Finance (Dec 6)

Top10Sources has editors who select from the top 10 sources on a topic from news media, blogs, and other online sources and pipes them in using RSS.

John Palfrey, founder and publisher of Top 10 Sources, said, "Top 10 Sources organizes information in blogs, podcasts, wikis, photoblogs and other sources into 'reading lists.' The goal is to foster an active conversation among readers, authors and editors that is about, and results in, great online content with context."

But judging from the selections for Canada, the sources don't have to be about the topic and self-absorbed chatter is acceptable.

Blogosphere 2005

The Pocket Guide to the 2005 Blogosphere, Pete Blackshaw, Clickz (Dec 13) -- It's much easier to create a blog now and there are 22 million of them Blackshaw has more headlines but doesn't mention the one thing that could seriously damage the blogosphere - splog.

OA Librarian

OA Librarian - new weblog about open access resources by and for librarians. Might pick up a few nuggets here. Format and display needs work.

Google Blogsearch

Bringing the Blogosphere to the Masses by Mary Ellen Bates, EContent (Nov 16) - About Google BlogSearch - mentions that " Blogs provide access to invisible Web content, and that may be one of the enormous impacts of search engines' acquisitions of blog sites."

Freshdaily for Canadian cities

Freshdaily is "Canada's first national blog network". It promises to carry news and comment on culture and events. At present there are city blogs for Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto and Mississauga, Ont.

Blog Search Engines

State of Blogosphere Search Randy Charles Morin, RSS Blog at KBCafe.com (Nov 14) - State of blogosphere search is not good.

The big aggregators Technorati, PubSub and others - are not updating their content inspite of multiple pings to announce that there are new postings.

Splogs are clogging the works mainly from Weblog.ro and Blogspot.com.

Ranks the search tools. Finds IceRocket and Google Blog search to be the two best blog-search engines, and BlogPulse to be fairly current but small.

Blogs added to Topix.net

Topix Tags Blogs Topix.net weblog (Nov 6) Topix.net has added 15,000 weblogs to its feeds. Topix analyzed the content of top blogs vs main stream media. There is significantly more coverage of technology and business in the blogs - even entertainment. They chose the blogs by "by crawling about 1M blogs, and then began automatically filtering and ranking these using our NewsRank algorithms -- which consider a variety of factors, such as blog posting frequency, writing style, type of reference, popularity, and so forth. We ended up adding the top 15,000 sources that passed these tests."

Sullivan on Splog

Problems With Splogs & Time-Based Searching Search Engine Watch Blog (Oct 19) - Danny Sullivan blasts out against splog - spam blogging - and predicts that all search engines, web and blog, will end up excluding all weblogs done through free services such as Google's Blogger, Yahoo 360, and MSNSpaces. It happened with the free homesteading web space at Tripod and others, and will likely happen with blogging. Blog search engines are more affected than Web search because entries are ranked by date.

Blogspam rampant

Google Draws Fire Over Blogspot Spam Blogs at Netcraft (Oct 17) - What everyone has suspected for some time - Blogger (or BlogSpot) is overrun with spam blogs. Hard to say how many there are but Technorati counted 39,000 new ones in the last 2 weeks. IceRocket has stopped indexing posts from Blogspot.com.

Google Blog Search

Google Does Blogs by Mary Ellen Bates, The Virtual Chase (Oct ) - reviews Google's new blog search engine - http://blogsearch.google.com/. Notes two limitations: only indexes the content in the feed and not the blog; and only dates back to March 2005.

Technorati Blog Finder

Technorati Launches Technorati Blog Finder in SEW Blog (Sept 7) - Technorati has a directory-like blog finder that uses the tags people have been assigning to their postings - and somehow that converts to a tag for the blog.

Blogs Record Disaster

Blogs Provide Storm Evacuees With Neighborhood-Specific News by Yuki Noguchi, Washington Post (Sept 7)

"As the world's news media show the big picture of the devastation left by Hurricane Katrina, some Web sites are finding ways to provide specific information to those hungry for details about their homes and local landmarks."

Specific mention of Ernest Svenson's blog - Ernie the Attorney, and Brian Oberkirch's Sidell Hurricane Damage Blog.

Also see Blogs and Information Community Respond to Hurricane Katrina by Miguel Ramos, Newsbreaks (Sept 6)

Librarian bloggers

Investigating the Biblioblogosphere by Walt Crawford, Cites & Insights: Crawford at Large - examined and evaluated 60 weblogs done by librarians (or for librarians).

Katrina blogs

Bloggers Emerge As Information Sources in Hurricane Katrina's Aftermath "CNN.com most cited source for hurricane news, with bloggers playing unique roles in disaster and relief efforts" PRNewswire via Marketwatch (Aug 31) -lists some on-the-scene blogs.

ZabaBlog

Blogging about the Joneses by Elinor Mills, CNet News (Aug 26) - Zabasearch, a search engine for personal information, is going to introduce ZabaBlog where people can write about other people. ZabaSearch collects address, birthday and other public information on people in the United States and links to for-fee background-check services.

State of the Blogosphere

Fascinating series by Dave Sifry of Technorati of the State of the Blogosphere August 2005. Read the series at the Technorati Weblog. Search on the tag for blogosphere.

Part 1: Blog Growth - at the end of July Technorati was tracking 14.2 billion blogs, double from 5 months previous with the first spike in February and March. About 55% have had a posting in the last 3 months and about 13% are updated each week.

Part 2: Posting Volume - chart shows a steady growth in daily postings and at the end of July 2005 was at 900,000 per day. This is about double that of January 2005. New or improved free blog spaces (MSN Spaces, AOL Journals, Blogger, and Live Journal) as well as blogging add-ons in many other tools are fueling the growth.

Part 3: Growth of Tags - people seem to love tagging (categorizing) by terms that mean something to them. In a social space on the Internet, such as Technorati, the resulting system is called a folksonomy. By the end of July 2005 about 30% of new postings each day have tags. A video shows changing interests in the blogging community through the tags being used.

Part 4: Spam and Fake Blogs - spam and fake blogs are created by automated programs as space for ads. They are a pestilence in the blogosphere and everyone is trying to do something about it.

Part 5: The A-List and the Long Tail - shows the most influential blogs according to links to sites.

Newsweek's Blog Roundup

Technorati and Newsweek by Dave Sifry, Technorati (Aug 25) - Newsweek has introduced a Blog Roundup in cooperation with Technorati that shows the "most blogged about articles in Newsweek in the past 7 days". See the section on at Newsweek or go directly to Blog Roundup for more.

Bass's Tips for bloggers

Reading (and Writing) Blogs - Tips for tyros and old pros; plus Bass's upcoming blog - Steve Bass, PCWorld (Aug 17) - has articles, tools and examples of weblogs and RSS.

Spam and Splog at Blogger

Blog Search Engine Threatens Ban of Blogger Blogs by Lisa Vaas, eWeek.com (Aug 17)

"Mark Cuban—self-dubbed "blog maverick" and owner of both the Weblog search engine IceRocket and the Dallas Mavericks—has warned that those who use Google's free Blogger service under the Blogspot domain may soon be kicked out of IceRocket's search engine due to the insufferable amounts of blog spam the free service produces."

Insufferable is the right word. Another word is splog - spam added to comments on blogs. Google, Yahoo, and MSN are working on fighting splog by not indexing it, but what about Google (who owns) Blogger doing something to stop it from being posted?

Compose in Word, Publish in Blogger

Google Releases Blogger for Microsoft Word By Deborah Rothberg, Microsoft Watch (Aug 18) - blogging just got a lot easier for people who use Blogger - they can publish directly from inside Microsoft Word 2000 or higher.

There have been many favourable reviews (says Microsoft).

""What makes this tool so attractive to those who like to ensure their copy is properly spelled and punctuated is the ability to push the 'Publish' button on the toolbar and see their work actually posted on their blog," opined Chris Richardson, a contributing writer for WebPro News."

Corporate Weblogs

Corporate Blogging Gaining Momentum By Jeanette James, EarthWeb (Aug 2)

"Like email and instant messaging, blogging is becoming yet another conduit of corporate information and, just like its cousins, one that needs to be controlled and monitored."

Blog tagging

State of the Blogosphere, August 2005, Part 3: Tags Dave Sifry on August 04, 2005. Tags: Blogosphere - explains tagging of blogs as seen at Technorati. Almost a third of postings carry tags or categories. Author doesn't comment on quality.

Yahoo 360

Forbes Directory has a Website review for Yahoo 360 - Yahoo's Weblog space.

"Yahoo finally opened Yahoo 360 up to the public in June 2005. Unlike Google's standalone Blogger, Yahoo 360 integrates blogging with social networking, so that you can find blogs written by friends of friends, or even their friends, as well as sharing photos and profile information. You can also make your blog (which will be located at 360.yahoo.com/YOURUSERNAME if you activate the "simple URL") readable only by friends of friends, hiding it from the general public."

Blog Primer

Time to check: Are you using the right blogging tool? By Susannah Gardner, Poynter Online (July 14)

"Blogs are one of the hottest publishing tools around, but picking blog software can be confusing and frustrating. Use this primer to get a feel for what's available and what will work best for you." - Covers the jargon and the tools. Also has comments from readers.

Blogpulse for trends

Deeper Insight into the Blogosphere by Chris Sherman, Searchday (July 21) -- Many improvements at BlogPulse for tracking trends and getting information about blogs.

"Today Intelliseek added four more daily analytics to BlogPulse: top blog posts, top blogs, top news stories and top news sources, as cited by bloggers."

Blog searching at Clusty

The Best Blog Search Is All Of Them! - Metasearch The Blogosphere With Clusty by Gary Price, SEW Blog (Jul 18 ) - recommends using Clusty's metasearch engine for weblogs. It uses Blogdigger, Daypop, Feedster, Technorati, Blogpulse and IceRocket. Be sure to use blogs.clusty.com - clusty.com doesn't have this tab yet.

Technorati Boost

Technorati has a new look. It's more colourful and features most popular news, books, and movies on the front page. The most important change may be that it will pick up photos from Flickr and links from Furl and Del.Icio.Us. Search Options include search in text, link search, and tags. For example, search for the tag sla2005. There are 68 results, many from the SLA PAM Division blog, Science Library Pad, and Litinforum.

Technorati may be personalized too by setting up a Watchlist on urls and search terms and receiving results through RSS. Members can also add information to their profile to be displayed as part of general search results.

See Technorati Gets a New Look ResearchBuzz (June 22)

Blog for your company

Establishing a Weblog on your Intranet - [pdf] presentation at the SLA 2005 Conference by Sabrina Pacifici and Dennis Hamilton. Pacifici blogs law and technology. Hamilton set up a weblog at KZF Design in Ohio.

Opened with many good reasons for creating a weblog such as "non-technie solution for organizing content", is a communication tool and might help with information overlad. There is a viral nature to blogging. Quote from an IBM Development group was very striking:

"“Behind the scenes, a small handful of technical innovators developed and deployed an internal blogging service that has grown in a period of just 18 months to just shy of 9,000 registered users spanning 65 countries, 3,097 individual blogs, 1,358 of which are considered active, with a total of 26,203
entries and comments -- all of which has been put together strictly through word-ofmouth promotion. And it's still just a pilot.” http://tinyurl.com/de472

Once you are persuaded of the value, the Blog Software Breakdown page will help you decide what blog software to use. The most popular are TypePad, Blogger, and Blog Journal. Presentation goes through the considerations to bear in mind - hosted vs standalone, commercial vs open source, features.

In an organization you'll want to set up some guidelines or policies for blogging practices - contributors, content, style. Yahoo, CyberJournalist, IBM and others have put their policies online. See examples in the presentation.

The two speakers outlined the facts and features about blogs - essentially that most are easy to set up, publishing requires no special skills other than writing, and dissemination is simple. One of the main advantages is that the archives are searchable.

Dennis Hamilton walked us through his experience in setting up a blog and building readership. Mainly he keeps it on topic about architecture, positive, and with some bits on employees. His main advice in creating the entries was review, review, and review again - then publish.

There was some good advice on blogging essentials - establishing responsibilities, getting buy-in, validating content, and keeping current. Some ideas on what to blog about and how to collect that information. Generally, to keep in mind that there are many styles and applications.

Touched on producing RSS feeds in order to give readers an alternative to email or to checking the web page daily.

Lastly, for those thinking about setting up a company blog there is a page listing articles about corporate blogging and further examples of blogs. Blog Without A Library has links to blogs done by many different kinds of libraries. Even CEOs are blogging -- CEO Blogs List.

Blogpulse Trackers

Tracking Trends via the Blogosphere By Chris Sherman, SearchDay (June 7) -

BlogPulse from Intelliseek is a specialty engine for searching the contents of 11 million blogs to see the entries and track the popularity of the terms across time.

Want to track mention of Canadian political scandals? Track the Gomery Inquiry against Grewal's tapes. See Gomery vs Grewal.

Sherman also describes the Conversation Tracker - "a threaded view of the conversation graph from a link to a post or to a new article (or any URL)." Blogpulse gives the example of kryptonite with a particular blog posting as the seed. But you can do it from a topic as well - such as grewal tapes.

Local Blogs

Finding Local Blogs By Jonathan Dube, PoynterONline (June 7) - tools for finding bloggers who blog from a neighbourhood near you.

+ Blogdigger - US city or zip code plu topic. For outside US enter the longitude and latitude to the Advanced form. Toronto is 43° 39' , -79° 23' -- results. But it is very limited.

+ Feedmap - use this to geo-code your blog and search for others.

+ VideoBlogger - map - handful of blogs. -

How to do Blogs

Blogs Got Content! [pdf] by Sabrina Pacifici, LLRX (April 24) Excellent presentation about weblogs - general introduction to the topic, how to find them, how to use them, how to start one. Main point - these are knowledge management tools. Has examples. Covers RSS too.

Blog Hype

Once blogs 'change everything,' fascination with them will chill by Kevin Maney, USA Today (May 24) - These are being so hyped one can only figure that the blog bubble will burst soon. Very funny piece that riffs off the Monty Python spam skit.

"Blogs have come on like a cloud of locusts. The blog search engine Technorati says it now tracks more than 10 million blogs. By the time you finish this column, about 300 more will be started.

A recent Pew Internet & American Life Project study found that 16% of the U.S. population reads blogs and that 6% of adults have created a blog. "

Structured Blogging

PubSub Announces Structured Blogging Initiative, EContent (May 20)

"PubSub has announced the launch of Structured Blogging, a foundation that provides a means to include tags in Web pages and blog postings that identify structured data as rich data, rather than simple text." ... "Structured Blogging is very similar to an edit form on a blog; the difference is that the structure will let users add specific styles to each type, add links and pictures for reviews."

Blogs for Business

Blogs: Hip and Hazardous, by Dana Flavelle, Toronto Star (May 10)

This article has a blog quality to it as Flavelle journalizes findings about weblogs obtained through searching the Web, interviewing the analysts, and reading the blogs.

"Business has a lot to learn about blogging and the sooner the better. Customers are using blogs to sing praises — and air complaints. Employees are using blogs to complain about workplace conditions. Competitors are using blogs to circumvent mainstream media and get unfiltered messages out to the marketplace."

Yahoo 360

Yahoo Blogging Service Boosts Content in PC World via Yahoo News (May 2)

"Yahoo plans to add the capability to import content, such as photos and music, from non-Yahoo applications to its new Yahoo 360 social networking and blogging service, according to an executive of the company." ... "Yahoo 360 will be made widely available to the public in the next few weeks, at which time the capability to share non-Yahoo content will also be included, Brody says."

Blogging Growing

Blogs Continue to Gain Traction by Enid Burns, ClickZ (May 3)

"A quarter of all Internet users say they read blogs, and 9 percent say they've created one, according to an update to the "State of Blogging" report published by Pew Internet & American Life Project in January." .. "Compared to other forms of media, Pew said blog readership equals 40 percent the talk radio audience, and 20 percent of the newspaper-reading population."

Pew / Internet - State of Blogging

More on Podcasting

Podcasting by Eliot Van Buskirk, MP3 Insider (April 22) -- good primer on podcasting - "Think of podcasts as blogs but with audio instead of text." Mentions some search tools and has information on how you can produce podcasts too.

HighBeam Research for Bloggers

HighBeam Reseach has a new suite of tools to help bloggers. Members of HighBeam Research will be able to add HighBeam articles to their blogs, websites, and email. Share Your Research Using HighBeam Blog Enhancer

Members will also be able to receive RSS feeds on searches and alerts they set up. HighBeam RSS.

See Highbeam Research Press Release (April 14)

Blog for Librarians

Blogs Without A Library - "blog about what libraries are doing with blogs and rss" - by Amanda Etches-Johnson, a Reference Librarian at Mills Memorial
Library, McMaster University in Ontario.

Opinion Blog Aggregators

Human and automated aggregators help make sense of blogosphere by Mark Glaser, Online Journalism Review (Apr 5) -- Names and rates blog aggregators that provide a weighted view of the blogs to find themes or patterns. Findory.com gets a very high grade for learning from what you read. There are several politically oriented blogs about blogs. Slate's Today's Blogs is a human-powered blog that picks up major chatter on the blogs.

Blogs and Consumer Buzz

Blogs, Boards, and Posts: Capturing Consumer Buzz Online - By Greg Jarboe, SearchDay (Apr 7) - reports on a session from the Search Engine Strategies conference, February 28-March 3, 2005, about reaching consumers through blogs.

Interesting bit about what people will get back when searching for a company.

"... when prospects search for your company, the top 10 listings are likely to include:

* 3 listings from consumer posts to blogs, message boards, and opinion sites
* 2 listings from experts
* 2 listings from your own corporate site
* 1 listing from an online publication
* 2 listings from other sources"

Message - marketers should watch blogs.

Some information about

+ Bloglines, "the world's most popular free online service for searching, subscribing, publishing and sharing news feeds, blogs and rich web content."
+ Blogpulse from Intelleseek, " real-time analysis of online buzz and consumer-generated media."
+ Micropersuasion Blog by Steve Rubel

BlogPulse 2.0

BlogPulse, a service from Intelliseek for watching what is happening in the blogosphere, just got bigger. It follows 9.5 million blogs and has a 6-month archive. Graph occurrence of terms in weblogs using the BlogPulse trend tool.

Track Blogosphere Buzz with New and Improved BlogPulse 2.0 in SEW Blog (March 20)

Blogs and Business

One blog leads to another.

Peep Into Blogging Movement Inside IBM in Sadagopan's weblog on Emerging Technologies,Thoughts, Ideas,Trends and Cyberworld (March 20) -- picked up an entry about blogs at IBM.

IBM has 2800 Inside Blogs (March 14) at Portals and KM by Bill Ives.

"Some of these blogs are "information blogs" linking to interesting articles and other sources and some are used for project management. In this latter case the blogs are used to get the team on "the same page" on project progress or critical issues being tackled. I have heard that they have been getting great benefit from these project management blogs like a number of other IT firms."

Portals and KM "shares ideas and hopes to generate discussion on the use of portals, blogs, and knowledge management to provide value to organizations through practical applications. New trends and technologies are covered with a switch to music and food on the weekends."

Outsell on Blogs

Blogs and RSS must really be mainstream now. OutSell has a new study -- HotTopics: Blogs: Betting With House Money -- examines the business impact and lessons, and identifies the companies.

State of the Blogosphere

David Sifry, CEO of Technorati, is writing a series of articles in his blog about the blogosphere. It starts with State of The Blogosphere, March 2005, Part 1: Growth of Blogs -- "Technorati is now tracking over 7.8 million weblogs, and 937 million links." That was nearly double the number 6 months earlier in October 2004.

All About Weblogs

BlogBib - An Annotated Bibliography on Weblogs and Blogging, with a Focus on Library/Librarian Blogs... by by Susan Herzog, Information Literacy Librarian @ Eastern Connecticut State University -- well done.

Vlogging and Moblogging

Bloggers Add Moving Images to Their Musings By SANDEEP JUNNARKAR, New York Times (Feb 25) - Weblogs have moved out of text and into video (called vlogs) and postings from camera phones (called mobile blogs or moblogs). This article reviews the main services, web and otherwise, for setting up weblogs, and the software or services for adding video content. Content can be syndicated through RSS which people can pick up and view through special RSS aggregators - in particular mefeedia.com and ANT

Theoretical Librarian

Gerry McKiernan, frequent poster at library-related listservs, has opened his own weblog - Theoretical Librarian. Gerry McKiernan is Associate Professor and Science and Technology Librarian and Bibliographer at Iowa State University Library. His observations and discoveries are always interesting. The blog has a RSS feed. The announcement about this weblog is good news, that Gerry intends to stop posting at BusLib-L is not. Email is usually a must-scan, whereas RSS feeds are very optional and easily forgotten.

About Six Apart

Couple Build Startup Into Blog Powerhouse by Michael Liedke, AP via ABC (Feb 19) Describes the work of Mena and Ben Trott in building up Six Apart Ltd , a company that provides blogging tools - TypePad and Movable Type.

But there is competition -- "Software giant Microsoft Corp. is seeking to undercut TypePad with a free blogging service called MSN Spaces. Six Apart also faces another formidable rival in online search engine leader Google Inc., one of the companies where Ben unsuccessfully applied for a job in 2001. Google in 2003 bought another blogging pioneer, Blogger."

Mena Trott used to keep a blog herself called Dollarshort. http://mena.typepad.com/dollarshort

Kapica Blog

Jack Kapica, technology writer at the Globe and Mail, has a -- weblog -- a "... personal commentary on trends and items of interest in the news." No RSS feed. Also no links to his columns, now part of the for-fee Insider Edition.

Collaborative Online Tools

New Tools Making Online Work Easier by May Wong, AP via ABC (Feb 13) -- "The idea is to make it easy to quickly post and remove stuff from digital bulletin boards where the online communities of the future will gather to catch up and trade ideas, images and work." Mentions JotSpot, Bubbler from Five Across for community bloggins, and iUpload from Canada for blogging. Also Pluck -- "that's designed to be a one-stop personal information manager for search, blogs and data feeds known as "Really Simple Syndication," or RSS a system that grabs fresh information from designated sites and distributes summaries and links to the user."

Blogs from Iraq

Blogs of War A Review of Alternative Sources for Iraq War Information by Paul S Pyper, Searcher (Feb 2005)

" The beauty of blogs lies in their immediacy and interactivity. Readers can respond to posts immediately via the comments link and see their responses published automatically. Any blog author will attest that this immediate feedback provides fact-checking, stimulates discourse and debate, and adds extensive content. In the case of Iraqi blogs, both soldier and civilian, these posts also send love, comfort, support, and advice to and from friends and family."

Lists starting points for finding all kinds of Iraqi blogs and bloggers - written by soldiers, journalists, critics of the war, women, people in the US, and live from in Iraq.

Getting News from Weblogs and RSS

Memo to media establishment: Ignore blogs at your peril By Frank Bajak, AP via MercuryNews (Jan 27) - reports on conference on Blogging, Journalism and Credibility at Harvard University and accounts of changes to journalism.

Of interest:

"The sovereignty of Big Journalism is eroding.

In our business, as my boss, AP chief executive Tom Curley, observed recently, what matters now is not the container but the content. That may sound self-serving from a news wholesaler, but I can tell you that most of the information I process, books and magazines excepted, is in electronic form and delivered to my e-mail inbox via RSS feed.

The best single war story I've seen out of Iraq, a piece on the fight for Fallujah by Knight Ridder reporter Tom Lassiter, I learned about from a blog's RSS feed."

Blog for your company

Enterprise Blogging by Laurel Clyde, FreePint (Jan 13)

"This article, based on a presentation about "Enterprise Applications of Weblogs" at the "Online Information 2004" conference exhibition in London in December 2004 , will provide an overview of the applications of blogs in enterprises, and introduce resources and sources of further information."

Checking the Pulse of Weblogs

Intelliseek to watch superbowl 'buzz' Business Courier (Jan 10) Look what can be done with blogs -- "Cincinnati-based Intelliseek said it will conduct a real-time analysis of messages and opinions expressed in millions of Internet Web logs, or blogs, message boards, online communities and sports enthusiast sites to see if ads were creative enough to trigger discussion. The company will rank buzz by volume, emotion, appeal factors and penetration among influential consumers."

Intelliseek runs BlogPulse - an "automated trend discovery system".

Of interest -- What was hot in the blogosphere in 2004?

Using Bloglines

If your resolution in 2005 is to explore RSS feeds, start with the Bloglines, the web service. This tutorial shows how to add feeds.

Halavais, A. C. (Oct. 25, 2004). Bloglines Step-by-Step. A Thaumaturgical Compendium. Retrieved Jan. 03, 2005
http://alex.halavais.net/news/index.php?p=872

Tsunami Blogs

Blogs provide raw details from disaster scene by Jonathan Schwartz. CNet News (Dec 27) Personal blogs quickly reported on the tsumani disaster in Asia and India and at least one (tsunamihelp.blogspot.com) is the centre for postings on ways to get and give help.

Waypath

Waypath Debuts New Look and Service Search Engine Watch Blog (Dec 27) Waypath for finding and reading blogs has a new look. There is also a Blogs On News
Blogs service to report on what bloggers are saying about the latest news stories.

Open Access Blog

All this time (since May 2002) there has been a weblog for Open Access News. It's about " Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature on the internet."

Has several entries about Google Scholar.

On Dec 17, 2004 it mentioned the SDL search engine - Search Digital Libraries - covers Library and Information Science.

Blog Stats

The Blogosphere By the Numbers by Rob McGann, Clickz (Nov 22) Technorati estimates that there are 4 million blogs, and figures from Pubsub suggest 6.5 million. But only 200 blogs get substantial traffic ( 1 million pageviews per month) and 20 of those receive over 10 million pageviews per month. Most blogs are done by people under 30 years of age.

Best Blogs 2004

Best blogs of 2004 by Frank Barnako, CBS Marketwatch (Dec 15) [Subscription] -- "The Best Overall Blog category was won by Powerlineblog.com, Best New Blog was NationalReview.com's Kerry Spot, and Best Election Coverage honors went to RealClearPolitics.com."

Bloglines Adds Languages

Bloglines Debuts Internationalized RSS Service eContent (Dec 7) - "Bloglines, a free online service for searching, subscribing, publishing, and sharing news feeds, blogs, and rich Web content has unveiled an internationalized Web site that allows people who speak Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Portuguese, and Spanish to join and navigate the Bloglines service in their native languages. "

Technorati Tracks

Tracking the net "From egos to news, Technorati tells us who’s linking what. CEO David Sifry discusses its technology, and how the company will compete with industry big shots like Google." Red Herring (November 29, 2004) Technorati tracks blogs - 4.8 million of them. It knows what is hot in news and in books.

HighBeam for Bloggers

HighBeam Names "Chief Blogging Officer" EContent (Dec 3) HighBeam Research has partnered with Christopher Locke, "the chief blogging officer" to develop ways that bloggers can use HighBeam as an information source such as searching the newspapers and journals and checking facts. Members will be able "to provide their readers with time-limited free access to full text articles in their blogs." See http://www.chiefbloggingofficer.com/

Oddly, there is no information about this at HighBeam.

Application of this will be fairly specialized - used more for reference research (as Christopher Locke is doing) than current awareness. HighBeam does not carry much current material. On a search for Pierre Berton, a Canadian journalist and historian, who died November 30th there was one story from Agence France Presse English. While there was better coverage of the election turmoil in the Ukraine, it mainly consisted of stories from AP and AFP. HighBeam is not a good tool for current news. As well its alerting service is much too basic. The idea to attract bloggers to use HighBeam is good but I think HighBeam will have to beef up its service to make it work.

MSN Does Blogs

Microsoft Debuts MSN Spaces for Bloggers AP via Forbes (Dec 1) MSN Spaces will be a new blogging center, free to people with a hotmail account or MSN instant messenger. Bloggers will be able to alert people thru MSN Messenger about new postings. Check it out at spaces.msn.com

Cory Kleinschmidt was not impressed and gives two reasons why it will fail. MSN Spaces: Better Off as Vaporware? Traffick.com (Dec 2)

Corporate Blogging

Corporate Blogging [PPT] by Sabrina I. Pacifici, LLRX.com. (Nov 28) Excellent presentation on the usefullness of blogs for an organization, the different kinds, and how to develop. Comments on blogs as a method "to facilitate research services, knowledge management, marketing, training, and communications within groups, departments, and enterprise wide".

Blog Numbers

The Blogosphere By the Numbers Rob McGann, Internet.com (Nov 22) Still hard to pin down the number of blogs - at least 4 million, many 10 million but many are dead or almost so. Blogging is mostly done by people between the ages of 13 and 39.

Blogs and RSS

New Stuff From Feedster and Technorati Search Engine Watch Blog (Nov 7) Feedster has a blogs-only search in order to separate those rss feeds from the news sources. Technorati has many new search options.

Search Engines and Blogs

Web Feeds, Blogs & Search Engines By Mike Rende, Guest Writer Searchday (Oct 28) -- Report from the Search Engine Strategies conference, August 2-5, 2004, on "how search engines are dealing with blogs and Web feed (RSS/Atom) content, and how providing such syndicated content can drive new search-related traffic."

Of interest --""There are 4.1 million different blogs. That number is expected to grow to 10.3 million by the end of this year," said Amanda Watlington of Searching for Profit. "

Wikipedia Woes

Current Cites comments on an article in Red Herring about the Wiki Wars describing the difficulties in keeping the Wikipedia online encyclopedia free of bias and error - intentional error. Wikipedia may move to employing editors. Another dream and promise of the Web wrecked on the shoals of human perseverity. Current Cites - October 2004

Blog Primer

Advice to the Bloglorn By Lois C, Ambash. LLRX (Oct 26) Intro to blogs and RSS feeds for reading and for publishing.

Yahoo, RSS and Media

Meeker on Digital World: Blogs, Yahoo Are Winners by John Battelle, SearchBlog (Oct 26) Summarizes some major points made by Mary Meeker at Morgan Stanley in her Update on the Digital World. [pdf 21 pages]

Of interest:

" The Internet has become a leading source for news and information over the past decade, but we believe the emerging acceptance (by users and publishers) of Web content syndication services will drive even broader / deeper usage of the Internet as an increasingly relevant news and information medium"

"While Google’s search engine and advertising tools set the pace for new ways of searching information, we believe that Yahoo! may be setting the pace for new ways of serving information..."

"We believe syndication technology is one of the tools that through a virtuous cycle should propel Internet leaders such as Yahoo! further into the forefront of all media, albeit slowly and steadily."

Preservation of blogs

Blog Today, Gone Tomorrow? Preservation of Weblogs Richard Entlich - Cornell University, RLG DigiNews (Aug 15, 2004) - Importance of blogs and whether their content should be saved.

Blog search at IceRocket

IceRocket Adds Blog Search to New Features Search Engine Journal (Oct 7) IceRocket, a meta search engine, will search blogs from a database of RSS feeds from blogs only

Wikis for collaborative work

Wikis: not just for techies any more "Knowledge-sharing on-line communities may replace e-mail as collaborative tool" By ANICK JESDANUN AP via Globe and Mail (Sep 27) Wikis are like group weblogs - several people can post and edit, correcting each others work, adding to it. Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, is an example. This tool can also be used easily by any work group. Article has some suggestions -- "There are Wiki cookbooks, a compendium of quotations and a repository on guitar players. College professors use Wikis to spur discussion. Software developers create on-line manuals. Small teams within businesses track projects, exchange ideas and list good places for lunch."

Literary Blogs

Blogging for Books The Internet is changing the way we talk about literature.
By Ellen E. Heltzel. Poynter Online

"Now, instead of broadcast [for promoting new books], bloggers are increasingly challenging traditional media outlets in deciding the winners and losers of the book world." Article and discussion that follows names several literary blogs.

Blog Clog

Microsoft flip-flop may signal blog clog By Paul Festa, CNET News.com (September 16, 2004) "As Web logs gain in popularity, critics warn that they are increasingly becoming the Internet's new bandwidth hog. " Microsoft has been finding that the developer blogs it supports have been hogging bandwidth. They'd like to cut back. Problem will likely spread.

To blog or not

Cheryl Gidley looks at blogs from a marketing view: reasons to use them, reasons to avoid them, and formats that might be used. To Blog or Not to Blog? iMedia Connections (Sep 1) Part 2, Who Owns Your Blog? (Sep 2) considers copyright issues, and summarizes the ways in which blogs can be used.

Blabble for searching blogs

ResourceShelf has an entry about Blabble - a new engine that will analyze blogs to pick up the buzz on companies and products. It's aimed at the corporate market. Price likens it to WebFountain. Web Search--Weblogs (Aug 31) There are other weblog engines -- Waypath, Technorati, and Daypop.

Travel Blogging

Blogging Across America "Who needs postcards? Use high-tech ways to stay in touch while you're traveling." Joel Strauch, special to PC World (Aug 20) Used Yahoo GeoCities to report on travels.

Blogs for Business

Blogs go big business by TESSA WEGERT. Globe Technology (Aug 19) - being seen as a useful tool for building relationships with customers.

Wikis Explained - Audio

The NPR radio program All Things Considered had a session about Wikis, the collaborative weblog style of authoring best known through wikipedia.org where hundreds of people have contributed to the encyclopedia. David Weinberger explains. Commentary: Wikis. (July 21)

Corporate Blogs

Blogs: The Marketing Killer By Michael Singer Internets.com (Aug 13) -- "multi-million dollar corporations looking for cheap and effective ways of getting their message out are using the technology to their advantage."

Overview of weblog tools

An Overview of the Weblog Tools Market elise.com On the Job. (Aug 6) - analyses hosted vs stand-alone, free vs fee. Blogger is the biggest for free hosted. Movable Type from Six Apart does very well as stand-alone and now has a fee-based licensing. Article is also interesting for the search tactics used at Google with domain name, link and url to extract data.

Branding through weblogs

10 Rules for Corporate Blogs and Wikis by Nick Wreden. Marketing Profs (Apr 13, 2004) - How to use weblogs and wikis (collaborate, group version) to build up loyalties.

Blogging for Business

Blogging and business moving mainstream By Spencer Swartz, Reuters (July 28) - businesses are using blogs for communications but there are concerns.

"In a sign blogs are moving mainstream, major technology companies including Microsoft and IBM came together at a recent conference to discuss the profit potential of the Web publishing format."

Blogsphere

Into the Blogsphere -- "online, edited collection explores discursive, visual, social, and other communicative features of weblogs. Essays analyze and critique situated cases and examples drawn from weblogs and weblog communities. Such a project requires a multidisciplinary approach, and contributions represent perspectives from Rhetoric, Communication, Sociology, Cultural Studies, Linguistics, and Education, among others." University of Minnesota.

BlogsNow

A ResourceShelf Interview: Andreas Wacker from Blogsnow Steven Cohen interviewed Andreas Wacker for ResourceShelf (June 10) BlogsNow tracks weblogs to identify emerging topics according to their links. On June 11 there is as much about Ray Charles' death as President Reagan's funeral. ResourceShelf interview looks at how it works and plans for the future.

The News According to Blogs

The Blog-Only News Diet An experiment in mainstream-media deprivation. By Steve Outing Poynter Online (JUne 7) Steve Rubel used weblogs as his source of news for one week, eschewing all standard news media (radio, tv, newspapers). Then Steve Outing quizzed him. Rubel got 12 out of 20 questions. Blogs aren't a bad source but are usually a day behind. There is a list of the blog aggregators and blogs he followed. There are many topic niche blogs though business seemed poorly represented.

"What, if anything, can we take away from Rubel's blog-only diet experiment? Probably that blogs remain in their infancy, despite the wave of press they've received in the last year. They provide a reasonable, but far from perfect, entry point into the news space, better at offering commentary and starting conversations than serving a current-events-indicator role."

Ask Jeeves Blog

We can know the popularity of a search engine by the number of blogs that group around it. Andy Hagans has been doing this blog about Ask Jeeves for a few months -- www.hagabot.com. (Mentioned in ReseachBuzz)

Blog Searching

Trends in Blog Searching By Christina K. Pikas LLRX.com (May 24) - Identifies two categories for searching blogs: "information from within blogs/across blogs or addresses of feeds from blogs so that you may subscribe in your aggregator. " Article describes how to use the inurl operator to search for blog content in a general search engine, and names and describes four leading weblog search engines (Bloglines, Bloogz, Waypath, Feedster).

Who reads blogs?

Blogads.com set out to find out who reads blogs (because they hope to deliver ads to them). The Blogads survey included 17,159 blog readers. It showed "blog readers are older and more affluent than most optimistic guestimates: 61% of blog readers responding to the survey are over 30, and 75% make more than $45,000 a year." They also read a lot - much of it online.

Gates on Blogs

Microsoft's Gates touts blogging as business tool By Reed Stevenson, Reuters (May 20)

Bill Gates preached the benefits of weblogs to a group of CEOs invited to the Microsoft CEO Summit. In the audience were Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, Michael Dell, Carly Fiorina, Barry Diller and others notables. Microsoft has 700 employee bloggers itself. Will Microsoft add blogging and newsreaders to its software?

New Version of Movable Type

Blog Development Tool Ships: Six Apart adds plug-in options, authentication tools to Movable Type. Peggy Watt, PC World (May 13, 2004) Six Apart has released a developer version of Movable Type for blogging but will be continuing to enhance the shareware version also. Different licensing options apply for consumer and commercial.

Semantic Bloggin

Semantic Blogging: Spreading the Semantic Web Meme by Steve Cayzer. Hewlett-Packard (2003?) -- "Our vision is to use semantic web tools and ideas to help move blogging beyond communal diary browsing to rich information sharing scenarios. We have built a simple prototype as an illustration of this vision. "

Blognews does politics

Read This, Jump Into Blog Fray
By Daniel Terdiman Wired (May 12) What's Making Blognews lists the top 100 stories being linked to at political blogs - about 600 of them. Links may be to stories in the news media or prominent weblogs. Stories are flagged as rising, falling, or with a star (new). Very interesting approach.

Google Blog

Google blog somewhat less than 'bloggy' By Stefanie Olsen CNet (May 12) Google has joined the party and opened a blog at http://www.google.com/googleblog/. By-line is "Insight into the news, technology, and culture of Google." Ewan Williams, creator of Blogger, is the program manager. Stefanie Olsen has noticed Google editing its blog entries over its expansion to India.

New features at Blogger

Google polishes up Blogger site by Stephanie Olsen. ZDNet/ CNet -- "Still a free product, the Blogger revamp will enable people to publish to the Web via e-mail, a personal digital assistant or a cell phone; to create simple "About me" pages that can be linked to multiple Web logs; and to enable readers to post comments to their sites. It also provides more than 30 templates for "blog" layout, according to Google."

PubSub Weblog Search

PubSub.com will run saved search queries on weblogs and send you the results in an RSS feed to be read in your newsreader. The site has several prepared search / feeds for politics, sports, technology and entertainment.

Weblogs as a library service

Weblogs and RSS in information work "How can weblogs be used in a library and information service?" By Ian Winship . Update May 2004 -- Identifies three main uses of blogs by librarians: "personal use by librarians for updating; as resources to point users to; and as a way of providing information about libraries and services. "

Private journals public

Blogs: private lives laid way too bare By LYNN CROSBIE Globe and Mail Update (April 24) - reflections on the new practice to bare soul in public weblogs - "With the advent of the blog, yet another new technological medium, a disquieting void is appearing between once well-demarcated public and private spheres, a void that is certain to close, vanquishing privacy entirely, in the process." Celebrities do it (Barbra Streisand!), girls do it - where will it end?

Blogs Growing Up

Weblogs gaining maturity, becoming more useful By Dan Gillmor. Mercury News (April 21) - Weblog of a blogging conference at Harvard University -- Bloggercon -- blogs really have come into mainstream. Article talks about blogs being used in business, and blogs as the business.

Searching Weblogs

Trends in Blog Searching [pdf file] by Christina Pikas in b/ITe, the bulletin of the SLA Information Technology Division (March / April 2004) By blog searching, the author means searching for postings in weblogs. On the main stream search engines - Google, Yahoo, Teoma - basic trick is to search for blog or weblog in combination with archives in the url. There are also some tools that will index blog content from XML feeds. Bloglines is mentioned, also Bloogz, Waypath, and Feedster.

Kinja a blog reader

New Kinja Portal Digests Weblogs by Barbara Quint. Information Today (April 12) - Kinja will digest weblogs. There are some preset categories, but users can create their own by registering and entering the URLs of desired weblogs. In this sense, Kinja can be an alternative to using a RSS newsreader.

Boing Boing

Boing Boing Plus Battelle Equals Blogs as Big Business? by Rebecca Lieb. ClickZ Experts (April 9) Boing Boing became such a popular blog that the traffic pushed up expenses to such a degree that the blogger - Mark Frauenfelder - asked his readers for suggestions. They poured in and he has John Battelle looking at the possibilities - likely commercial possibilites. Battelle sees the success of blogs like Boing Boing as indicating "a huge shift in the media ecology."

Blog Digest

Nick Denton of Moreover fame offers a digest of weblogs on several subjects. Kinja.com. Kenja's editors pick entries for the Showcase digest on all subjects. More themed digests are on books, food, sex, movies, politics - liberal and conservative. Frank Barnako at CBS Marketwatch reported (via the New York Times) that Denton is trying to reach the 90% of Internet users who don't read blogs. Great idea but needs more editing.

MSN Blogbot and others

Microsoft to create search site for Weblogs By Michael Bazeley Mercury News (March 27) MSN will be indexing weblogs it picks starting in the first half of this year using the MSN BlogBot. It will look a bit like MSN Newsbot, in beta test in the UK.

Microsoft is also building an Answerbot to answer specific queries - who, what etc. Said to be 3 years away.

Microsoft to upgrade search tools By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY (March 27)

Weblog Awards

The winners of the 2004 bloggies have been announced. These are awards done by a group of enthusiasts connected with South by Southwest Interactive Festival held in Texas. Boing Boing , "A directory of wonderful things", was named the best weblog overall. There are some interesting categories - best design, best Canadian, best topical, most humorous, best programming, best photography. There is much here to keep any blogger or bloggee occupied.

Tim Bray online

Tim Bray has left Antartica Systems, the information visualization company he helped to found. He has been using his weblog site to help in finding a new position. It's at tbray.org and his job hunting page is called Looking for a Gig. He says in one post that Google Ads will cover his hosting costs.

Infectious Blogs

Warning: Blogs can be Infectious. by Amit Asaravala. Wired (March 5) - Get ready for tipping point on blogs -- ""What we're finding is that the important people on the Web are not necessarily the people with the most explicit links (back to their sites), but the people who cause epidemics in blog networks," said researcher Eytan Adar. "

Blog Design

Blog Design at the Design Desk. (Feb 20) - says good web design has moved to weblogs. Has some links to resources.

Waypath and related searches

Waypath, a weblog search engine, has a new feature by which you can find books at Amazon that might relate to a weblog or weblog posting. Enter the url and Waypath does the matching.

There is also the Weblog Post Analysis - which will find related weblog posts to a given one. For example, an analysis of a posting I did about RSS vs Atom found 69 other weblog entries about the RSS / Atom controversy. You can follow a trail of postings by picking news ones to analyze from each set of results. You can also limit results to a particular weblog (clicking on the +) or exclude (the -). Related books show on these pages as well.

Blog Search Engines

Ari Paparo Dot Com keeps lists of blog search engines.

Big LIst of Blog Search Engines

International Blog Search Engines

detod for sale

Detod Communications is looking for a buyer of the detod legal portal (Detod legal portal for sale - Jan 14). This includes "the blawg search engine, legal research, and "my detod" aggregator; our co-branded pages; and our news. The legal research also has a caselaw database feed that is not live yet, but the code is 98% finished. " Detod Communications wants to concentrate on email hosting instead. [Mentioned at TVC ALert]

Vote for Best weblogs

Do you have a favourite weblog? Check out 2003 Weblog Awards Open.

Weblogs booming

Technorati.com is adding 8,000 to 9,000 Weblogs a day to the 1.2 million they track today. (From CBS Marketwatch.com)

Nick Denton does blogs

Nick Denton, who may be best known for starting Moreover Technologies, also does blogs - sexy, gossipy, topical blogs. One of these is the gossip site, Gawker. It seems he has a good sense of the media possibilities of weblogs.

Building a Web Media Empire on a Daily Dose of Fresh Links by Andress Ross Sorkin. New York Times (Nov 17)

Of interest ... "The way Mr. Denton determines the theme of his blogs has less to do with his own personal interests than with the demands of the market, as determined by Google. He relies on Google's AdSense program, which pays Web sites to publish text ads matched to the pages' content, for the bulk of his revenue. As a result, he picks blog subjects based on the rate Google pays for clicks on ads in specific topic areas. Among the topics of blogs he plans to start this year are computer gaming, travel and politics. '

"But Mr. Denton is thinking about how to expand the blog market, perhaps by creating product-focused blogs for major marketers. His next big project is a site called Kinja, which is supposed to be the blog of all blogs, compiling the best of Web log writing from thousands of different blogs."

Article predicts that soon everyone and their grandmother will have a blog.

Spam in Weblogs

Spammers Clog Up the Blogs by Chris Ulbrich. Wired News (Oct 24, 2003) -- Now we have blog spam. Spammers insert their URLs into comments at weblogs. Turns out that Movable Type weblogs are the most open. There's no clear solution and the worst has yet to come. No mentioned in the article is that bloggers should close the comment facility - as I fear I will have to do for my two weblogs.

Blogrunner

BlogRunner Announces Weblog Content Portal PRNewswire (Oct 20, 2003) - BlogRunner groups weblog entries into topics and news stories. Home page has a summary of the major stories. Directory is really a search engine of blogs by name, author, or topic. You can also search for news stories.

Of interest -- "Most search engines index individual web pages. BlogRunner, however, is capable of identifying the specific chunks of content within a page that correspond to weblog entries. This makes it possible to reassemble these chunks into more meaningful discussion threads.

One key feature of weblogs is the way they dovetail with articles from traditional media outlets. BlogRunner highlights this interdependency by closely integrating weblog entries with the media headlines they reference. "

Bloogz

Bloogz - World Wide Blog. New search engine searches weblogs in five languages - English, French, Italian, German, Spanish. Can sort results by relevance or date. No information about Talent Group Srl.

Weblog Churn

As The Blogs Churn By Robyn Greenspan, Cyberatlas (Oct 8, 2003) Two studies on blog longevity seem to indicate that bloggers who use hosted, free services are often one day wonders, whereas those who host their own weblogs are more stable and durable. Hosted blogs number around 4 to 5 million (Blog-City, BlogSpot, Diaryland, LiveJournal, Pitas, TypePad, Weblogger and Xanga), and could double in the next year.

WebBlogs and Journalism

Nieman Reports (Sept 2003) [PDF file]

Nieman Reports is a quarterly publication from Harvard University about the news industry. The September 2003 issue has several articles about -- Journalist's Trade: Weblogs and Journalism.

"In this section of Nieman Reports, bloggers and journalists (some of whom wear both hats) write about the points of convergence and divergence of Weblogs and journalism. What separates these forms of communication? How do they influence each other? Is what’s happening on Weblogs changing how journalists do their jobs and, if so, in what ways? Can news organizations embrace Weblogs and maintain the standards of the craft?"

There are 18 articles, several by leading journalists. Here is a sample:

Weblogs and Journalism - Do they connect? by Rebecca Blood - sees "wide adoption of Weblogs as just the first wave of an age of online personal publishing."

Is Blogging Journalism? by Paul Andrews

Weblogs: A Road Back to Basics by Bill Mitchell -- "Weblogs are providing journalists with more edge". Includes a guide to weblogs.

The Infectious Desire to Be Linked in the Blogosphere by Mark Glaser

Determing the value of blogs by Eric Alterman - "Blogs. Blogorrhea. Blogosphere. Blogistan. Blogdex. Blogrolling. Warblogging. Where it will all end ..."

Bloglines for easy RSS reading

Bloglines is a free web-based service for subscribing to and reading RSS news feeds. No need to download an application or the feeds. Bloglines will also blogroll your subscriptions to add to your own blog. Blogline was reviewed in the October issue of Internet Resources Newsletter.

Cyberjournalists

The Role of the Delete Key in Blog by Michael Falcone, New York Times (Sept 29)

"Is a blog still a blog if someone else edits it? A recent policy change at The Sacramento Bee has raised questions about whether taking an editor's pen to a Web log before it is published detracts from very nature of Web logs, or "blogs,'' as the online diaries are called. "

Mentions Cyberjournalist.net as a site that has more information about the weblogs of journalists.

From the Cyberjournalist.net site -- "Cyberjournalist.net focuses on how the Internet, media convergence and new technologies are changing journalism. The site offers tips, news and commentary about online journalism, digital storytelling, converged news operations and using the Internet as a reporting tool."

It has a page of J-Blogs - weblogs done by journalists.

Weblogs for business

Suddenly weblogs are good for business. Frank Barnako in CBS MarketWatch wrote Blogging business idea gets booed (Sep 26) (subscription required) in which he looked at the reaction to Weblogsinc.com, a new web venture by Jason Calacanis. Weblogsinc.com would be a home to bloggers on business topics. It would provide hosting, software, and billing for those who join. On the question of whether this can succeed, Barnako closes with -- "Calacanis' challenge is to find solid, fact-checking, deadline-driven, responsible journalists whose reporting will be trusted and perhaps, even bought, by business. Those kinds of writers and reporters are tough to find, and often employed. If they're not working, why not?"

The public beta site for Weblogsinc is http://www.weblogsinc.com/. The homepage gives three reasons for participating - namely, better journalism, benefits of freelancing, and the advantages of partnering, and invites webbloggers and industry professionals to join.

Moreover Weblog Search Tool

Press release from Moreover announces its new "real-time weblog search tool for the enterprise".

Moreover Technologies Launches First Enterprise-Grade Weblog Search (Sep 22)

"The product harvests information from over 25,000 hand selected, business-critical weblogs in real-time and enables corporate users to gain access to the high value news, commentary and consumer opinion that resides within weblogs. "

Notes that there are over 3 million active bloggers. Because of the wide variety in quality, Moreover editors will rank blogs based on "reliability, integrity and caliber".

Also -- Moreover Introduces New Blog Monitoring Tool by Barbara Quint, NewsBreaks (Sept 29)

Of interest ...

- "In order to deal with the problem of variable quality within blog content, the company has developed a separate set of rankings. The company has also tagged each blog with metadata, including the number of incoming and outgoing links as well as the blog’s status in the blogging community."

- To get the Weblog Content Pack customers will need to subscribe to a ci service. Prices range from $ 6,000 to $250,000.

Moreover Search Tool

Search tool scans blogs for business by Matthew Broersma ZDNet UK (September 18, 2003,)

- ZDNet says that Moreover Technologies has created a weblog search engine to be used by companies to keep them informed about consumer trends and opinions. However, no url given and no mention of it at the Moreover web site.

Blogstreet

Blogstreet seems to be one of the better search engines for weblogs to which I am pleased to add Web Search Guide Internet News.

Daypop

Gary Price concludes his interviews with Dan Chan about Daypop. Daypop is a search engine covering weblogs. Behind the Scenes at the Daypop Search Engine. SearchDay (Sep 10) Chan gives 10 tips for using Daypop.

Personal blogs

Blogs: Hanging dirty laundry on-line By RUSSELL SMITH Globe and Mail (Sep 2)

"The Web is a high-tech gossip network: an entirely public notice board with very private functions. There is something about publishing, even self-publishing, even Web posting, that lends an air of gravity to one's personal relations; when written, they come to seem more literary, more important."

Daypop

Behind the Scenes at the Daypop Search Engine, Part Three by Gary Price. SearchDay (Aug 28) Has 10 Daypop Search Tips.

Weblogs / RSS

Mentioned at ResourceShelf

- Daypop has indexed 59,000 weblogs.
- RSS Readers - Peter Scott's list.

Library Blogs and WebJunction

The benefits of blogs for libraries are described in Blogs for Libraries by Greg Schwartz at Web Junction.

"WebJunction is an online community of libraries and other agencies sharing knowledge and experience to provide the broadest public access to information technology." WebJunction was launched in May 2003 and is the work of 5 partners including OCLC and Colorado State Library. (About WebJunction)

DayPop

Behind the Scenes at the Daypop Search Engine, Part Two by Gary Price. SearchDay (Aug 5) - interesting for explanation of trend analyses done on words, news bursts, wishlists on weblogs (some people aren't shy), and authority or blog importance.

Waypath for Weblog Search

Waypath.com is a new engine for searching weblogs - over 203,000 at this time.

"Waypath's Related Weblog Navigation engine analyzes weblog entries to determine their core conceptual makeups, compares them with one another to find out how related they are, and presents you with its best guess as to what's related to your original input. This is done all automatically, using available technology. "

I searched on Oliphant Ontario and was delighted to find a blog about the South Bruce called the South Bruce Peninsular .

There is also a URL search. It doesn't find entries from that URL. Rather it finds weblogs that have similar themes. Sitelines is a blog about web searching by Rita Vine, a librarian. Searching on www.workingfaster.com/sitelines finds other library oriented weblogs, as does searching on Gary Price's www.resourceshelf.com.

Wikipedia new media

Wikipedia: The know-it-all Web site by Kristie Lu Stout. CNN (Aug 4)

Flurry of activity in articles about Hong Kong in the Wikipedia shows off its open source outlook and global reach. Wikipedia is a free online encyclopedia written by volunteers using the weblog-like wiki software. There are over 132,000 articles.

Weblog Possibilities

Blogs Have a Place on News Web Sites by Steve Outing. Editor and Publisher (July 31, 2003) -- the many ways newspapers can make use of weblogs whether done by staff or independent journalists.

Most notably, there are the new moblogs - mobile weblogs with photos and text done over a photo phone - use these for celebrity watch and event coverage.

Some, like Rafat Ali in London UK make money from a niche weblog. His is paidcontent.org on new-media paid-content strategies.

Clearly, the weblog can be adapted to many purposes and is here to stay.