WSG Newsletter:
Searching for Weblogs
Issue: September 22, 2003
The breakaway popularity of the weblog for everything from personal diary to
community watercooler has injected a new energy to the Web. While probably at
least 50% of weblogs are personal and idiosyncratic chit chat about the day,
the other 50% may centre on current affairs, politics, education, law,
technology, journalism, libraries and many other topics.
Starting a weblog is as simple as registering at
Blogger for a free account
and choosing a template. Jupiter Research estimated that 2 percent of the
online population has blogged and 4 percent of the online community has read a
blog.
Weblogs are a grassroots movement. Bloggers tend to comment on the passing
scene, linking to articles and editorials by others. Diffusion of ideas is
rapid. Blogdex
(blogdex.net) is a research project at MIT Media Laboratory to track the
diffusion of ideas through the weblog community. Its main page gives a snapshot
of the concerns of the day by showing the articles that are being most
linked-to and by whom.
This newsletter looks at ways that we as readers can find weblogs. Many
services have sprung up over the past year. Some are very promising, but all
require our patience to find a weblog on the right topic and with the right
tone.
Demographics
Several new sites analyze the weblog phenomenon and assist in exploring the
blogosphere. Blogcount (www.dijest.com/bc/) and BlogCensus
(www.blogcensus.net)
count blogs. In June 2003, Blogcount put the number of weblogs at 2.4 to 2.9
million. The incidence of abandoned weblogs is high and soon dead weblogs could
outnumber the active ones. BlogCensus, from the National Institute for
Technology and Liberal Education, found that 66% of the 1.2 million weblogs it
indexed had received at least one post in the last 90 days. Its figures also
show that English is the main language (63%) and that blogs are concentrated in
the United States and Europe. Bloggers seem to be evenly split between male and
female, but BlogCensus found that women seemed to prefer the personal diary,
and men favoured the political category.
Directories
Several sites are directories offering topical and regional categorizations
of weblogs. These are a good starting point for seeing breadth and variety and
can help in finding the better ones.
Blogarama (www.blogarama.com) claims 69 categories and nearly 4000
links. Personal blogs comprise over 40% of those links, although it might be
said that all others, regardless of category – Arts/Culture to Current
News – are personal. Blogarama invites reader comments about blogs and
marks the country by a flag.
The EatonWeb Portal (portal.eatonweb.com) is one of the first directories. It has
a larger collection of nearly 14,000 weblogs, more points of access - category,
language, country, and name. Personals make up 26 % here. However, topical
category access is quite poor. Weblogs owners do the classification and will
often label their efforts as being about a ridiculous number of topics.
It’s too tedious to look over the entries. Rather, the best part of the
EatonWeb Portal is the section on Resources listing weblogs that are about
doing weblogs.
Brent Todd has tried to tackle the problem of evaluation. He opened the
Weblog Review (www.theweblogreview.com) where weblogs are reviewed,
evaluated and rated. Weblogs are categorized for easier retrieval, but the best
use might be to watch the list of the Reviewer’s Top 5.
Possibly the most entertaining way to find a weblog is by the author’s
birthday. Globe of Blogs (www.globeofblogs.com) has this and some other curiosities.
There are 7,200 weblogs, organized by topic and location. North America makes
up the bulk (4,500) specified by US state and Canadian province. Also of
interest is a list of weblog webrings – a group of weblogs that connect to
each other because they have something in common. The connection can be quite
very incidental – all from Ontario, all by bloggers over 40 years of age,
anyone with the name Sara.
Search Engines
There are several services that index the weblogs or RSS feeds generated
from the weblogs. An RSS feed is a way of staying current with new postings.
Many prefer to use news aggregators to read their weblogs this way rather than
by visiting the web site. Indexers can have different specialties. Daypop's,
for example, is current news. Feedster's might be pop culture and high profile
subjects of the day. Only by running a few searches will you be able to
determine which search engine is best for your subject needs.
Waypath (waypath.com)
has analyzed over 800,000 weblogs to identify common themes and subject matter.
The creators compare Waypath’s technology to that used by Google News to
bring like things together. It is probably best used to identify a group of
weblogs on a subject. Begin with a keyword search to identify one or two
promising weblogs (checking date and frequency), and then Waypath them to find
more-like-this. Of course, it can also be used to find individual postings on a
topic. Waypath includes in its index weblog-like sites such as the About.com
guides. Waypath has a buzz-o-meter that shows how frequently the subject has
been mentioned in the previous 10 weeks. Mention of Monsanto and GM soared in
the week of July 21, 2003 and tapered off into September.
When it comes to searching weblogs, Daypop
www.daypop.com is the first
search engine many people think of. Dan Chan is the creator and sole operator
with a strong interest in news. Consequently, Daypop’s specialty is
current affairs for which it indexes over 59,000 news sites, weblogs and RSS
feeds picked up from NewsIsFree and Blogstreet among others. Only a week of
material is kept. Ranking of results is based on link analysis and on proximity
of search terms along with some other factors. In addition to the standard
syntax of – to exclude, and “ “ to mark words together, Daypop
has an Advanced Search to limit by language, country or date.
Daypop keeps tabs on stories and conditions that interest the online
community. By analyzing links it picks out the top 40 news stories and weblog
postings. It also counts words to identify those with the most burstiness
– used most in weblogs or on the front pages of news sites.
An individual weblog can be a starting point for finding others at Daypop.
Blogstats evaluate a particular news site or weblog according to citations and
Daypop score. Through comparative analysis of content and links it can point to
“similar” weblogs (though suggestions are often way off the mark),
related weblogs (common links), and citing weblogs (a very good source of
leads). For example, readers who follow news about web search tools at
Research Buzz can use
Daypop’s Blogstats to locate other web-search oriented blogs.
RocketNews www.rocketnews.com doesn’t have as many features or
sources as Daypop but might do in a pinch. News stories are categorized into
one of seven topics, while weblogs are kept in their own category. A search
will find fewer weblogs than at Daypop but material will go back further.
For more advanced searching, Feedster
www.feedster.com is the
tool. Feedster indexes RSS feeds. In most cases these are automatically
generated feeds of postings from weblogs. It does this nearly minute by minute
while also keeping several months of old postings (six months in my tests). The
help page details the extensive syntax supported. It is case sensitive,
supports full boolean (and, or, not) with nesting, searching by country, url,
title, language, description, and dates. Feedster is the merger of Feedster and
rssSearch. The Advanced search lets you search a specified list of RSS feeds.
Blogstreet (www.blogstreet.com) has many search aids for finding weblogs
in its collection of over 145,000. You can begin by getting a profile of a
favourite weblog with author and rating (if the weblog is in its database) and
a list of other weblogs that are like it. The ‘neighbourhood’ is
determined by Blogstreet from analyzing the interconnections of weblogs. Some
weblogs keep a list of weblogs they follow - called a blogroll – and these
links will make up the neighbourhood. The effectiveness of this varies. Stephen
Downes’ site www.downes.ca, which is largely about distance education, has
a fairly large neighbourhood, whereas Steven Cohen’s Library Stuff (www.librarystuff.net), in
spite of a very long blogroll, does not.
Neighbourhoods can be explored visually through a Touchgraph interface that
lets one move through the relationships. The visual map for LibraryStuff is a
good example – click on the node for Lisnews.com to see a larger spray of
weblogs of interest to librarians including ResearchBuzz, ResourceShelf, and Ex
Libris.
Another view of relatedness can be obtained from Google as a
‘Googlatives’.(You can do the same at Google directly and possibly
get better results; eg. related:www.librarystuff.net).
There is a directory to a small set of weblogs at Blogstreet. Categorization
is probably done by the blog owner.
 The search engine is more impressive
where queries can be limited to postings within a date range or to a specific
blog. Results can be sorted by date, relevance, and blogrank. A search for
travel tips sorted by blogrank (to see the best first) locates a posting in
Boing Boing about an e-journal / weblog written by Dan Gillmore at
SiliconValley.com and his column about
travel in a post-9/11 world. (Incidentally, a Google search
for ‘travel tips’ weblog will find it too.)
Topical Web Search Engines
Legal beagles would be most interested in the topical weblog search engine
– bLAWg Search. (blawgs.detod.com/). The Advanced Search lists the weblogs
Blawg indexes and provides some search options.
The Most Popular Weblogs
By far the simplest method for finding good weblogs is to look at the lists
of most popular weblogs. This is usually determined from analyzing links.
Blogcensus lists the
25 most-linked to weblogs. Slashdot “News for nerds, stuff that
matters” leads by a good margin.
Daypop tracks the top 40
to show the links that are most popular with webloggers.
 BlogStreet counts blogrolls to determine the top blogs. The
very popular Boing Boing, A Directory of Wonderful Things (boingboing.net) is among the top
5. Another measure establish influence according to the status of the sites
doing the blogrolling. Boing Boing wins a spot in the top 5 there too.
About Weblogs
If you come to love weblogs, Blogroots (www.blogroots.com) will
appeal. It “tracks news in, around, and about the weblog world”. This
is kept by the people who wrote the book – “We Blog: Publishing
Online with Weblogs”. It keeps a list of resources for the blogger and the
reader.
Conclusion
Many people are taking a stronger interest in weblogs. Businesses might
search them for mention of companies and products. News publishers use them
more for breaking news. Webheads live in them. Many in education, libraires and
law have found them useful current awareness vehicles. Finding these, however,
is often by word of mouth. But some browsing in directories or using the search
engines and link analysis to find the communities could pay off. Starting with
a known weblog may be the most productive.
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References