Thing 3: Blog Search Tools

Though blogging is "firmly entrenched in the mainstream" according to Technorati's State of the Blogosphere, I am pretty much still on the outskirts. I have two blogs of my own now, one for class and this one. As far as contributing to other blogs, I am what they refer to as a "lurker", someone who hangs around looking, but doesn't reveal themselves. Sounds creepy!

I am going to record here Technorati's definition of the active blogosphere: "The ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation."

“Video will also become increasingly important to convey complex messages that are often lost in text - while audio will continue to fall away to this new medium, save those 'casts with high production values." This quote by Chris Pirillo made an impression on me. I'll be learning how to do podcasts in one of my classes. Maybe I'll see about video, too!

From Technorati: Blogs are not just personal diaries.

I started exploring by going to the subject list. I clicked on Real Estate (under Business) and ended up following the advice of a blogger to listen to a radio show featuring Peter Schiff. I looked under celebrity gossip and didn't find anything compelling. Literature didn't suck me in, either. I tried the videos section, but that didn't grab me. I can watch only so many Christian Bale remixes.

One of the exercises for Thing 3 is to do a seach in Technorati and compare it to a search of another database. I chose Google Blog Search. I looked up chemical injury. I was a little surprised to find that Technorati did not yeild all that much that was relevant. I tried clicking on the box that allows you to choose "most authority," and still got results that seemed "silly" to me. Maybe, because I'm in school, "authority" means something different to me. I believe that the way that authority was defined in Technorati, was the number of links to an external website in a blog. That's a different type of authority than what I am used to thinking of. Google Blog Search seemed to yield more relevant results. In fact, the Search Engine Journal does give it higher ratings for relevance than it does Technorati. What's the authority of the Search Engine Journal? It is difficult to know which sources to trust!

The Google Blog Search is now not letting me in for some reason, so I'll have to postpone further comparisons.

Technorati allows for sorting of various types. In addition to how much authority you want to choose, you can also choose language, whether you want to search photos, blogs, or videos. I am highly sceptical of blogs when they don't cite their findings. But, it is fun to see the blogging trends. For example Blogpulse lets you compare, for instance, blogging on auto loans, college loans, and mortgages. Mortgages was by far the most active, spiking in mid Novemeber 2008.

Interesting fact: Some people are profiting of their blogs. Mean annual investment is $1,800 and mean annual revenue is $6,000.