Related Blogs
I don’t use Bloglines, but I found myself stumbling on their site today through a page of related feeds. I found j’s scratchpad’s related feeds page out of curiosity and became inquisitive about how they figure out what’s related. I certainly don’t see the relationship between my blog and many of the sources on their list, like Dilbert, but then again, I stopped reading Dilbert years ago because I thought it was boring and I’m still writing in this space even though some of you think it’s horribly boring. Maybe there is a relationship there.
It makes me wonder a few things:
- How reliable are their relationships? If I’m searching in earnest for feeds related to a source I know, am I going to find something that’s really related or just something Bloglines is pushing on me because it’s popular?
- How does Bloglines decide something is related? Perhaps this tidbit is on their site somewhere and I should take the few minutes to look it up.
- I’ve been writing a lot about Wikipedia lately. sj also does. His blog is in Bloglines. Why aren’t our blogs related?
- Do the relationships change based on the content of the blog? I have some items on my front page right now related to RSS and Atom feeds. Sam Ruby’s weblog happens to be on the list. From what I’ve skimmed of his blog briefly, we don’t overlap in other areas. When the RSS and Atom post rolls off the front page, will Sam Ruby’s blog disappear from my list?
- Bloglines includes a number of my other blogs, as does Frassle. Yet, relationships between author don’t seem to be indicated. Is there some way to indicate that blogs have the same author? Is there some reason why they aren’t currently linked?
Frassle also does relationships. Its map of j’s scratchpad seems more concrete to me than what Bloglines shows because it highlights specific categories in other weblogs and indicates how close the relationship is with the amount of red in the white box. I’m a visual person and appreciate the visual cues instead of something just saying objects are related without saying how. Frassle also doesn’t relate the scratchpad’s Wikis category–where I file posts about Wikipedia–to SJ News. An interesting note is that Librarian Blogs often pulls the exact posts from the scratchpad and resyndicates them as its own content without appropriate attribution in the feed (which really annoys me because I should get credit for what I write and have copyrighted my material, but that’s a major digression). Yet, Frassle doesn’t show that Librarin Blogs’ categories are an exact match to the scratchpad’s categories, even though they should be exactly the same content.
Relating anything is tricky. These are good starts. I think I would rely on Frassle’s ability to relate posts more than Bloglines, but Bloglines probably has far more sources.
