Finding Blog Content
There are many challenges associated with finding content on blogs. CorporateBloggingBlog addresses the problem of relocating content posted on blogs, focusing on intranet blogs. I’m not sure how the idea of incorporating the blog into a Web site will mean that it’ll be easier to retrieve information on the blog. Made out of people seems a little too fixated on using Google to search blogs when there are other services out there that sometimes do a better job of that, like Feedster, but maybe Feedster doesn’t work behind a firewall/on an intranet. I don’t know. What about platforms with their own search engines, like Manila (but not Harvard’s installation)? And there’s no mention of plans of companies specializing in searching intranets, like Verity, of developing search engines that include blogs. Of course, as Made with people writes, I am joining the conversation late, so perhaps these points have already been covered elsewhere.
Christina Pikas’ article Trends in Blog Searching examines some of these issues, too.
I think some of what’s at issue is that we’ve gotten spoiled with some of the Internet search tools. We don’t understand why search engines for blogs aren’t as sophisticated and we’re having a difficult time being patient waiting for the technology to catch up with our fantasies.
I should be writing a presentation and not blogging anyway, so I’m not going to look now, but I know this issue will come up tomorrow.
Thanks for sharing, CP!
September 15th, 2004 at 9:30 am
Hi!
The idea of incorporating your blog into a more “traditional” web site is quite simple – you can work with information architecture, i.e. not being stuck with the chronological order of blogs. By grouping and prioritizing your content it will be easier to find, and that’s what I suggest – for important posts – as a complement to the blog.
September 15th, 2004 at 3:35 pm
Welcome, as always. The Google “Made out of People” is referring to, I believe, is the one you can buy to put on your Intranet. It’s a competitor to Verity and other enterprise searches. I saw a little of this behind the scenes at an organization that had something like 400k pages and a team of 20-30 indexers. As far as I know, there isn’t a version of Feedster (or Waypath) you can buy for your intranet. The developers for these would probably be willing to do it, but I think they’re almost permanently in Beta. One of the problems of Intranet search is making sure non-authorized users can’t find anything!