Week 2.1

A bit of a breakthrough on the blog search front. A comment on the Library2.0 site mentioned Technorati "Blog Directory Search" function. I'm still a bit mystified by some of the items that appeared, but a search for "Jewish studies" here did retrieve a couple of likely candidates. One is a blog ty the Jewish studies librarian at Washington University, St. Louis and it looks like just the kind of thing we ought to be doing for our users here. So, there is hope after all.

Week 2.0

I followed the link to the Wikipedia article on the blogosphere. I was particularly interested in looking at some of the aggregators or search systems that I'd seen mentioned and recommended in some of the other blogs. They're not listed, so I'm wondering if there is a better source for this information. Searched Google and found LISZEN by name. (I later found LISZEN and LibDex lower down in our site blog... I thought the link out to Wikipedia was the path we were supposed to follow.)

I tried searching "Jewish" to see what Jewish Studies materials are online - I could really use a JS library blog to support my work. No such luck. The results seem to be random. I either get an entry in a blog where "Jewish" is mentioned in passing or I get to the top of a site with no obvious Jewish content and if I search the site internally I find a single post with the word "Jewish" embedded somewhere, but no significant content. It may be a case of the content just not being there, but it is still frustrating to get so many false leads. Where is the good stuff?

LibDex is a bit of a mystery to me. Why the geographic orientation? This seems counterintuitive in the online world. There were a couple of broken images on the page and trying to find a search box or some subject approach, one of the Links listed took me to a lighting store. Hmmm? And, as long as I'm feeling cranky, why don't these sites say something more about what they are doing?

Finally, using Google's blog search I found a site featuring the Association of Jewish Librarian's 2007 conference. I tracked back to the assocation's main site and found "The Book of Life: a podcast about Jewish people and the books we read." It isn't really a blog though it is featured on blogspot.com, so I may be getting ahead of myself. I'll reserve this for the section on podcasting but it is as close to what I'd been trying to find as I can manage so far.

I found some interesting other sites but no blogs worth reading or revisitng. Maybe it just isn't out there.

day 1.1

I tried Technorati and searched it with a word. The first view was confusing and pretty useless. It searched blog ENTRIES and displayed them in order of posting date. I saw a lot of irrelevant garbage with little relevance to my interest. Looking for a way to sort by other criteria (Relevance or Ranking or ?) I found a tab for displaying by Blog, which turned out to filter out most of the random stuff.

There still didn't seem to be any way to adjust the sort order and I wasn't clear about how they ranked items. Looked at 5-6 blogs, selecting by title and description, and still was disappointed with the content at the other end. Most seemed to be rants and quite a few were inarticulate (lots of ALL CAPS and misspellings). Many were uniformed or misinformed. (I saw one rant that included a follow-up revealing that the subject of the rant turned out to be a hoax. Never mind!) Even some of the better put-together sites were like reading someone else's diary and would require a lot more energy and time than I care to invest.

I don't get blogs, at least not the personal ones. Well, I get why people write them but I don't get why anyone reads them. (I had a blog and after the initial rush of getting my ideas "out there" I found the energy waned and the space between entries got longer and long. I eventually just let it die, less than a couple months of starting it.) The blogs that seem to make the most sense to me are those that reflect the interactions of a community, where the members discuss issues of interest to them. But that's of interest to the members of that community. Interestingly, I didn't find any of that sort of blog -- even when searching by name -- with Technorati.

Back to the mechanics of searching blogs: it seems that given the random nature of the material there, keyword and even tag searching is bound to be frustrating. Trying Technorati's Advanced Search had some advantages in limiting retrieved items, but ironically didn't offer the "Blog" view, so I was stuck with a pretty random list with no way to get to the higher level view. I tried the same with bloglines and blogscope with similar results. I'm inclined to believe that it isn't the search engines problem but that of the unfiltered and generally useless nature of the blog world.

day 1

I've started my blog. Like most people, I don't have anything important to say. Unlike most, I'll stop here.