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.