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ASK’s New Blog Search ROCKS

I’ve been a closet fan of ASK for some time now. I’ve thought, like many, that they could. And since the purchase of Bloglines over a year ago, I’ve been waiting for them along with everyone else to bring out a robust, useful blog search.

It’s here, and it’s awesome! blogsearch.ask.com

Thank God They Get It

What worries me about these things (Search releases in general) is the lock in factor. I’m pleased to say that whilst promoting themselves, ASK have done a fine job of realizing that not everyone uses Bloglines, and that we all have our own preferences. You can see just from doing a simple search that there are very neat pulldowns to get the feeds of the individual results in handy subscribe buttons to major services, and lucky for me, to the raw feed.

You can also Digg it, Del.icio.us it and more. Game on!

No Crawler = Less Spam, Hooray!

Blogines founder Mark Fletcher says they’re indexing over 1.5billion archived posts, and the fact that they are searching what people subscribe to means that with a bit of luck, the results will be less prone to being full of shit, a la Technorati and pretty much every other blog/feed search already out there.

Chris Sherman, who wrote a great writeup for SearchDay tells us:

Since blogging and feeds tend to be more associated with individuals rather than organizations, Ask has also implemented a sophisticated name-recognition capability. Search for a name, and for active bloggers you see links to posts by and posts about the person. Another feature surfaces “top feeds” based on a combination of relevance to your query and popularity of blogs that match your query.

which is cool, though i’ve yet to find a way track links to posts, though to be fair, i was so excited when I saw this this morning that I really didn’t explore everything before posting. If you work it out, let me know….

Looking around at the various posts on this, it’s getting a pretty good play in the ‘sphere, and for my part, i LOVE it!

Let us know what you think.

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Sidenotes: An Elegant Replacement for Footnotes

Sometimes it is the simplest ideas that impress me most. I am just trying out a new javascript widget from Arc90 called “sidenotes”.

‘Sidenotes’ is a clever little piece of code that you can drop into your blog to allow you to easily create tidy little sidenotes or asides in your posts. This neat little piece of code, with a little bit of CSS tweakage, would likely fit into any blog and it is quite simple to use once setup. You simply put SPAN tags around the text you want to sidenote from, with a CSS class of “sidenote” and the text for the sidenote in the TITLE attribute.

To get it working in this post I had to paste both the JS reference and the CSS right into the content. I also had to set a width CSS attribute on the sidenote CSS class so that it wouldn’t stretch to the full width of the post which kind of defeated the idea of a “side” note.

It is worth testing before putting to use, I found it refused to work in my own blog, probably due to some CSS voodoo that is just beyond me. I wonder how it works from an accessibility point of view, perhaps one of our kind readers will be able to shed some light on that?

One irritation is, due to it using the TITLE attribute, the standard tooltip is still present. This can cause it to overlap the text quite jarringly, and isn’t the point that the sidenote is unobtrusive? Something they need to work on I think …

Ideally this would be a plugin for the major blog platforms, but that is a minor gripe really. When it works it looks pretty neat don’t you think?

Technorati Do Microformats, Pingerati

Just stumbled onto an announcment on the Technorati blog announcing two new services. Tantek Çelik writes:

I’m very pleased to announce the technology preview of Technorati microformats search for contacts, events and reviews, and Pingerati, a microformats ping distributor to support and grow the microformats ecosystem. Microformats are the key building block, the lingua franca, that make structured information open and sharable on the Web.

Microformats enable any site to easily publish common data types such as tags, licenses, contacts, events, reviews, listings, etc. on any page on the Web, with only minor edits to their HTML. For me personally, this has meant enabling millions of people to take control of their own data, publish and update it wherever they want, whenever they want, and move it freely among services, without having it locked up behind a walled garden or trapped in a “roach motel”.

Read more about Microformats Search and Pingerati on the Technorati blog. Read a simple overview of what microformats are here and here.

This is all completely new to me but if I’m getting the basics correctly (and for tonight, I just skimmed) it looks like one of those things that initially seems complicated and quickly simplifies everything else once you grasp it. Like RSS, CSS, Tags, etc. I think it’s something I’ll really like when I dig in a bit. A quote from the Microformats.org wiki sums it up pretty well:

Microformats make it easy for you or anyone to share and reuse data in your webpages and content elsewhere — for example, to populate an address book, browse social relationships, share reviews, tag content or publish and discover events.

Now, if this means I could publish my email address and keep it away from spambots, I’m in. But since it says elsewhere that the formats are both human and machine readable, I’m guessing it will not solve that problem (darn it). But it might be the answer to a question I got last week from Marcy at Root Magazine. She saw a beta version of ExtCalendar and wanted to be able to embed a searchable events calendar in her TypePad blog. Microformats kinda look like a way to do that.

When I get a chance to explore more fully, I’ll report in better depth. It appears that this is a big week (day, even) for launches, and of course I can’t try everything at once.

I did find one other really cool thing in Tantek’s post that I didn’t know about… Technorati Kitchen. This is th ebeta lab for new stuff from Technorati that’s ready for testing but not for release. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on that.

Why Are Multi-Writer Weblogs More Popular?

In Seth Godin’s Fiddleheads post, he raises an excellent point about developing a market. In his analogy, he points out that in any marketplace, say a Farmers Market, each booth owner is thinking that they’d do better if they were the only booth of their kind in the market. This feeling is echoed, Seth says, pretty much anywhere, but “this reasoning is fallacious”.

No doubt, bloggers often feel the same way, but I think that if there are more than two blogs on a topic, that’s actually a good thing for everyone. In a similar but different situation, a blog with multiple writers is arguably going to do better than most blogs with just one writer.

There are many examples of this, including most of the Weblogs, Inc blogs. My own writing has recently started appearing on other people’s blogs by request, and on one website, I’m getting several hundred pageviews per post. In just a day or two. None of my blogs have individually received as many pageviews in a single day or two, despite writing my ass off for 11 months now – and even though I publish the same type of writing and topics on my own blogs.

Why is that? I think it’s pretty simple to answer. When there is more than one writer, there’s something for everyone. There is more fresh content daily, and variety. And when writers on one weblog inter-link to each other’s posts, it’s an invitation for their loyal readers to read the other writers. A synergy is built up. But if a weblog only has one writer, the success of it depends solely on the cult of personality that that writer can build up, regardless of what they are writing about and how often.

As much as it might sting, there aren’t many writers who can achieve this cult of personality. A FEW good examples of such types of writers – in no particular order – are Darren Rowse, Seth Godin, Robert Scoble, Steve Rubel, Brian Clark, Yaro Starak, Steve Pavlina, Debbie Weil, and Guy Kawasaki.

The moral, for most bloggers, is that synergy is a good thing, but it is possible to be a successful soloist. You’ll note that every one of the above writers have regularly have something of value to tell their regular readers.

Know of any other solo bloggers who you think are developing their own cult of personality with their insightful writing?

Blogging Not Allowed

This weekend I will be attending a developer conference. I happened to mention in an online forum that I will be there with a camera. It turns out cameras are not welcome without special permission. Of course now I want to know why. Hmmm, ok, I thought, perhaps they don’t want secrets revealing or official announcements beating to the punch. Nope, no news announcements or NDA material will be revealed looking at the agenda. Scratch that one off the list.

While I am acting all offended and surprised, truthfully this isn’t the first time. Another event with a camera ban specifically asked people not to blog. It seems in this day where “word of mouth” is king (and rightfully so), conference organisers are slow to learn the benefits of it. They rely instead on hoarding the information, using PR and traditional advertising to get the word out.

How much greater and more effective will the buzz be if Flickr was awash with happy, excited faces of attendees? If technorati, tech.meme, digg was crowded with links to conference-related topics and blog posts of satisfied customers?

Of course I will still attend, and more than likely I will still blog it. Heck if I don’t get permission to take pictures I shall probably just try some sneaky camera phone snaps. Just a shame that these things are discouraged rather than seen for the win-win benefit they really are.

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5 Steps for Identifying Dodgy Blog Submissions

Recently I had to investigate a couple of article submissions here at Performancing. They smelt wrong, so I did the sensible thing and poked them with a stick to see if there really was something amiss. Im going to tell you why you need to check user contributed articles, and give you 5 easy steps to help you make the call.

Before we get into HOW, let’s just talk about WHY…

As a publisher, what goes out on your blog is your responsibility. Content does not necessarily have to be original, or even well written, (there is a lot of value in some aggregation and not everyone writes brilliantly) but you DO have a responsibility to your readers to not fill them full of shit. And it’s the kind of mind numbingly dreadful, regurgitated content that content spammers want to foist on you and your readers that you, as a responsible publisher have a duty to identify, and kill before it hits your RSS.

5 Steps For Checking User Submitted Posts

If you get that “somethings not right” feeling when reviewing a user submission, look for these tell-tale signs of content spamming.

1. Are the linebreaks out sync?
You can often see if an post has been cut and pasted rather than typed into your form by looking at the linebreaks. Most blog software automatically puts
tags on new lines for you, and if the article is breaking in the wrong places, its a good indication that further investigation is required.

There are a number of legitimate reasons why this might happen, so its by no means conclusive by itself.

2. Has it been submitted elsewhere?
Here’s a neat Search trick: take a 5 or 6 word fragment from the article (one without punctuation preferably) and enter it into Google like this: "this sentence was taken from the article" include the quotes.

Pick something as unique as possible. If the article has been submitted to a ton of places already, and Google has had chance to index them, it’ll showup in the results.

If it does, then also take a look at where it’s been submitted. Are those good sites? Or are they spammy article syndication schemes?

Tip: If you get results in your search, hit the ” repeat the search with the omitted results included” link at the bottom of the page — Google doesn’t like duplicate content much, so filters it out. If you find a ton of filtered stuff, it’s even worse than you thought.

3. Is there an obvious promotional angle?
With my recent investigation, there was a link and piece of promo text just screaming out at me. It stuck out like a sore thumb and looked to be the sole point of the article — to promote this service. Sometime’s that’s ok, but often it’s not, it’s a judgement call you need to make in combination with other factors.

You can check this with another Search trick. Enter this in Google: "Author Name" "linktext of service" — In my case I hit the jackpot.

4. Are there affiliate links embedded in the content?
One sure sign of undesirable content is having the authors affiliate id appended to urls in her links. If the links seem to contain codes/id’s where you wouldn’t really need them to reach the page linked to, then that could be the entire purpose of the submission. Motive doesn’t mean the article is bad quality necessarily, but 9 times out of 10, if you find affiliate links, you’ll find multiple submissions aswell.

5. Is it just wrong?
In some years of working with online communities, i’ve learnt to just trust my instincts sometimes. Occasionally something just feels all wrong, though you can’t put your finger on why. This isn’t usually the best reason to take action, but sometimes you just have to trust that your brain is processing stuff and reaching a conclusion without necessarily bothering you with the details….

Blogger Beware

I’ve been seeing more and more of this type of thing over the last few months, particularly from those touting promotional services. If you have any thoughts on this, or any other good means ot spot dodgy posts i’d love ot hear them.

It’s unfortunate that we have to even be aware of this stuff, but as publishers we do, because as i said earlier, if it’s your blog, it’s your responsibility.

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Tim O’Reilly Speaks, Oh Boy…..

You’d have to be living under a rock to have missed the kerfuffle over O’Reilly sending a C&D over the term web2.0, and the tech blogosphere has been waiting for a response from Tim with baited breath. Well, here it is: Tim O’Reilly speaks.

The post raises a ton of points, most of which im going to ignore as it’s past my bedtime and I could be here till next week trying to comment on them all…

A couple of things I’d like to say though: I can understand Tim being upset, but slamming bloggers for not being journalists is just naive. The ‘sphere is a mad, out of control mob at times, and it’s not going to change, it’s only going to get worse. That’s just the way it is.

Having said that, the cream does rise to the top, and those at the top, the thought leaders in tech blogging, should indeed show a little respect, and perhaps restraint when someone with such a stella reputation is under-fire and not their to defend themselves.

It almsot certainly wont happen though.

As for the whole “who owns web2.0” shinanigans, i’ll leave that for others to debate.

If I was really cynical, I’d say that there is a very good lesson in how to deflect attention in Tim’s post 🙂 Havefun reading that one, it’s long, but worth the time it takes as it brings up jsut sooo many questions…

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