j’s scratchpad

Next on the schedule is Sabrina Pacifici and Greg Schwartz of Open Stacks, who will tell us about how to search tools like blogs. Sabrina is speaking first.

Sabrina–it feels odd to call her by her last name when I’ve been refering to her and her work using her first name for a while–said she has a database to her blog, beSpacific, which she began in 2002, that numbers about 11,500 posts. That’s more than twice what I’ve done here in three years. That’s a pretty amazing number of posts.

Iran’s president is blogging and has an RSS feed. Pugs blog. The BBC blogs, and, according to Sabrina, they get it because of the variety of tools and methods of distributing content they use. Senators and congresspeople blog, but that is not yet the norm. Senator Patrick Leahy is one example. Eatonweb Portal tracks about 60,000 blogs. One challenge to tracking blogs is the speed at which they appear and disappear.

Many media outlets are beginning to blog and highlight their blogs on their Web sites’ front pages.

Sabrina will blog her presentation on beSpacific.

She is showing a lot of slides of tools that list and/or monitor blogs, like Blogpulse, topix.net, Bloglines, lists of blogs, and FeedsFarm.

Greg Schwartz is telling us about podcasting. Like blogging introduced the world to thousands of closet writers, he quips, podcasting has brought out many closet radio djs. He recommends Juice as a podcast aggregator. [Juice used to be called iPodder. It’s one of the podcast tools I use. It’s nice to see they’ve kept the lemon icon.]

Podcast and video directories: Podcast Alley, Podcast.net, iTunes, Blinkx, Podzinger, and Podscope. Podscope offers a few neat features, like searching based on automatic transcription of podcasts and the ability to set up search alerts. Podzinger uses similar technology and tries to show it in the search results.

Pluggd looks very promising because it shows where in an audio file the search term is mentioned.

It’s a good idea to remember when searching for podcasts that most search tools only index metadata associated with the file as opposed to indexing the content of the entire file.

Tag: il2006

This entry was posted on Monday, October 23rd, 2006 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Professional Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.