Daily Bits

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The State of Blog Search

Blog search is an industry in a state of transition at the moment. A few years back, it appeared as though Technorati had successfully positioned itself as the dominant blog search engine among the Internet-savvy crowd.Then a growing number of smaller, sometimes more innovative options began to appear and nip at the heals of Technorati. But now those smaller blog search tools, as well as Technorati, are starting to give way before the simplicity and ubiquitousness of the master of information brokerage – Google.

The latest victim is Feedster, which has had a “We’re Changing” notice up on their frontpage for a number of weeks now with no visible signs of life. Further feeding the rumors that Feedster is a goner is the fact that its accompanying company blog has been removed.For its part, Technorati is still very much alive, but some worry that it is trying to move too far outside its original purpose.

Efforts to become more than just the best blog search and filtering service resulted in Technorati burning through its investment money with little to show for it, losing a CEO and being forced to downsize. Today Technorati still offers a decent search option, but gone are many of the result filters and other features that made it the go-to search service during the early days of blogging. I personally turn to Google (both Google BlogSearch and the main Google index) for blog search for the simple fact that it’s right there; no, check that, it’s everywhere.

Competitors cannot merely be comparable faucets of information. They have to improve on that information stream that Google increasingly controls and delivers with unmatchable speed and convenience. Sometimes I open up a browser tab for Ask.com and their blog search because the results are often less cluttered with irrelevance and spam than are Google’s, though the slight improvement in result quality is not enough to cause me to switch to Ask as my primary blog search engine.

Bloglines, which is owned by Ask, may currently offer the best alternative. Bloglines is first and foremost a personalized online RSS feed reader. Searching for blog results from among the feeds you have personally subscribed to is the best way to eliminate search result spam, and both Bloglines and Google Reader allow you to do this. However, this option precludes discovering new sources of answers to your questions. Understanding this limitation, Bloglines also allows you to search through all of the feeds subscribed to by all of its users.

The results may come from feeds you did not choose, but you know that someone did subscribe to them (you can even see how many people subscribed to each individual feed via the “preview feed” link), so the likelihood of a spam blog being indexed and showing up in the results is extremely minimal. The other benefit of Bloglines is the ability to read your feeds and conduct searches outside your own subscriptions from within the same service.

The downside of using Bloglines for blog search is that its users have indexed a far smaller percentage of the blogosphere than Google.There are several good options out there for blog search, as well as a lot of room for growth and innovative development. As on most fronts, Google appears to be leading the way at present, but future surprises can probably be expected from both Technorati and Ask/Bloglines.

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Flock: Pretty, But Still Not Very Useful

Version 1.0 of the much anticipated Flock browser was finally released earlier this month following more than two years of development. The release was met with much fanfare, but despite the amount of time and energy put into Flock, at this point it remains little more than a piece of eye candy.

Flock is a very good browser, being that it is basically Firefox in a shinier skin. But it falls somewhat short in the other areas of functionality it boasts.

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Flock’s blog editor, for instance, is woefully less powerful than the alternative browser-based tool Scribefire, and light years behind corresponding desktop tools like MarsEdit, Ecto and the newly-popular Windows Live Writer.

Similarly, Flock’s built-in RSS feed reader is polished and easy to use, but currently can’t hold a candle to the likes of NetNewswire, FeedDemon and Newsfire.

The bits of Flock that shine the brightest are the Facebook sidebar and the browser’s integration with online photo storing sites Flickr and Photobucket.

However, despite the Facebook sidebar’s impressive functionality, it still pales somewhat in comparison to simply leaving Facebook open in one of your browser tabs. And while the photo uploading and sharing tools are likewise well implemented, the millions who turn to Kodak, Google and various smaller providers for their online photo storing needs have been left out in the cold.

Some will argue that while Flock may not be the best of breed at any of the individual functions it performs, it does provide the benefit of being able to do all those things from within a single application. But at a time when many new computers are offered with at least 1GB of RAM, and additional memory can be purchased dirt cheap, is it really a problem to have a separate blog editor, feed reader and Internet browser open at the same time? Surely the added functionality of the more feature-rich individual applications trumps eliminating the need to switch windows, a task that the ctrl+tab (cmd+tab on Macs) keystroke makes negligible.

There are purists who insist that an Internet browser is for browsing only, and should not be made to accomplish tasks it was not originally intended for. At present I am inclined to side with those purists (using Safari with no add-ons is a blazingly fast and pleasant browsing experience), though I do hold out hope that Flock, or someone else, will eventually manage to create a browser/blog editor/feed reader that is better than the respective standalone applications without consuming the bulk of a computer’s available memory.

Flock is a positive step in what could be “the right direction,” but after two years of development some hoped for a little more solid functionality to go along with the spit-shined exterior.

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Will Mainstream Media Become Profitable Online?

A debate has been raging for the past several years over how to make online news media a profitable business venture. I am not talking about one-man blogs or faux news startups, which have minuscule overhead costs and therefore a much shorter road to profitability.

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I am talking about the mainstream media corporations that realized they must find a way to utilize the power of the Internet, and that they must do so quickly. These companies have hundreds of reporters in the field, and incur enormous monthly expenses to maintain their coverage over a wide range of topics.

Some have argued that bloggers are the new breed of journalists, and that they will eventually replace traditional reporters and their employers. This could work at a very localized level, but perhaps without the mainstream media corporations, a great deal of news coverage would dry up. Ninety-nine percent of bloggers could never get to national, industrial and entertainment leaders with the same ease and consistency as correspondents for mainstream media corporations.

It is in the interest of bloggers and social media that the mainstream media companies survive. That is why talk of Digg and other mushrooming social media sites – not to mention the growing number of blogs whose readership surpasses most print magazines – killing off mainstream media outlets is not completely accurate.

The bigger problem is that mainstream media publishers have failed to realize that the Internet is not merely a vehicle to carry their traditional text-based content. The Internet is a unique and interactive medium the potential of which has barely been tapped. Not only that, the Internet is also able to be bent and shaped, to be constantly changed to match growing needs, unlike print, which comes in one format and one format only.

A lot of great minds and creative folks have pored over this issue without any significant breakthroughs as yet, so don’t think that I am going to provide the golden egg here. What is becoming increasingly clear is that publishers, both big and small, are going to have to learn to harness the Internet as a teaching medium, a platform not only to disseminate information, but also to interactively connect with and convey knowledge to their readers.

How this will work with hard news is still somewhat up in the air. Most Internet users have been conditioned to expect to find their news for free in a certain kind of format. It is going to take a bit of reeducation to convince readers of the value of an interactive teaching environment, of being presented with true knowledge of a topic or issue rather than mere information.

When someone does finally figure it out, the next shift in the presentation of online media is going to enable mainstream publishers and bloggers alike to become masters of a new medium that has the potential to eventually blow away print, radio and television. And just like after every other innovative new wave to hit the Internet, the early adapters to whatever evolutionary step online media takes next are going to control the field for the foreseeable future.