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[datamining.typepad.com]
Version 00.15, April 2008
Searching among Internet Blogs for Information
by Fravia+
"I have yet to find a really "good" blog and agree that most are just ramblings of morons speaking on subjects they know little to nothing about.
Its like a second generation of those GeoCities sites which had "my vacation photos" or a diary of the birth of someone's baby
or endless rantings and ravings about this politician or that actor."
The term "weblog" is used since 1997/1998 to describe personal websites that offer
frequently updated observations, news, headlines, commentary, recommended links and/or diary entries,
generally organized chronologically.
While there are many websites that are frequently updated, e.g. this one, what makes a Weblog a Weblog is that
it's organized chronologically and it is designed for short, frequent updates.
Most blogs have a dozen or so readers, but a handful have built up audiences in their thousands.
There are news blogs, comment blogs, war blogs, diet blogs,
disease blogs, cat blogs, dog blogs, blogs about blogs.
The use of blogs accelerated as the process of blogging
became simpler with the advent of idiot-proof software for setting up your own weblog, such as Blogger,
Pita, Groksoup, Diaryland, Live Journal and others.
Filter style blogs
In fact many blogs are just "micro-portals", they are filters, linking to sites and/or articles that the author finds
worthwhile for his readers. These filters are often enough linking to the same sites (the "unbearable incestuousness of blogging").
Free style blogs
The so called "free style" blogs are focused less on the outside world and more on the internal world of the blog author,
and range in style from traditional
diaries to daily observations of the world.
Blogging is a form of dilettante journalism that presents many challenges but also
several strengths: it offers for instance a creative freedom
that may not be available in other media: a cosmic freedom in being able to represent
yourself precisely as you want to, however sloppily, irrationally or erratically.
Other strengths of the medium include the possibility of immediate
publication, a great interactivity, and the lack of any marketing constraints.
Some of these strength are at the same time great weaknesses: the lack of editors
and of other people's feedback BEFORE the publishing,
for instance, means that
personal prejudices can often unbalance the bloggers' view of the facts.
While the previous restraints of space (with print media),
and time (with broadcast media) are not applicable online, the new constraint
is that of the reader's attention span. Blogs can survive only on some conditions:
1) They must be constantly updated
2) A decent amount of quality must be kept
3) They must generate NEW CONTENT
Since very few humans are capable of respecting these constraints on the long (and even on the medium)
term, blogs are, with due exceptions, a very "ephemeral" phenomenon, that contributes
a great deal to the "quicksand" (or if you prefer: "littered with rotten carcasses") nature of
the Web.
In fact what -alas- happens, is that people always follow 'trends', so they read somewhere that
blogs are 'in' and want to "try it out"... hence every idiot and his cat is starting another
"random thoughts"
collection, a
blog, that will basically suck, and last maybe a couple of weeks.
Never underestimate how boring people can be!
Should you
underestimate it, blogs will quickly bring you back to reason.
The absolute majority of blogs, 99% of them, do not
receive any comment whatsoever (who should comment apart automated spammers' scripts?
No-one is reading such drivel) and this ensures that the
wannabees bloggers will suffer a psychic
depression, keep less and less their own blog "updated" and turn to the next trendy thing of the web.
This said, in a world where most media are simple vectors of puerile propaganda,
blogs "can" ("can", he) represent a very effective alternative journalism,
that allows people from very different
cultures to interact with each other, thanks to the universal nature of the web, and -let's not
forget it, of the
pidgin english used on the Internet, and discuss issues that at the best are ignored and
often enough are demonized by the main medias, which are nothing
but propaganda trumpets of their owners. But this has always been true of messageboards and usenet
as well. Actually chances are that if you vent your "random thoughts" on the old usenet you'll get (and quickly)
many more comments and answers (and attacks) than you'll ever get with a blog.
Yes: once again, by allowing anyone to get his hands on the means of information production - to write, produce and publish his own
content without needing an editor or publisher, all Internet forms of publishing (and hence also blogs) may threaten
the traditional media's hold over
the spread of information and ideas.
Unfortunately enough, many bloggers are just bitchy individuals with some axes to grind, unable of
rising above their immediate concerns and personal prejudices and not capable of weighing up the facts.
Moreover, alas, there are
many more bigot right-oriented bloggers as one would deem possible in a medium, like
the Internet where even idiots can find real (and professional) information pretty easily.
Well, they can find it only if they learn how to search, duh :-)
Difference between RSS and ATOM
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) is just a dialect of XML.
RSS feeds may be exploited by readers that "subscribe" to them in order to be notified.
In order to subscribe to RSS feeds you must have a tool that can read these RSS feeds, an "aggregator".
These tools are called "News Aggregators", "RSS Readers" or "News Readers". There are many out there.
The most common are NewsGator (http://www.newsgator.com), that -alas-
works inside the very dangerous and crash-prone bloated spyware called "MS Outlook".
Bloglines (http://www.bloglines.com) is a web-based, very popular aggregator.
Basically the point is that you, instead of actively browsing the web and teh sites you like by yourself whenever you feel like it, will be notified by your aggregator when a
blog has changed, kinda like being spooned TV-ads if you ask me :-) This is of course necessary because
most blog sites
don't change that much, after a initial concentration of activity, and there would be no point in visiting
them at all.
Still I guess that such aggregators and RSS feeds may be useful in order to substitute some niche email-newsletters.
Apple
is for instance using them.
Blogs may offer TWO different kinds of feeds: Atom and/or RSS.
Readers may wonder... "What is the difference?" "Why have both?" "What are they for anyway?"
Basically, they do the same thing. They allow Internet users subscribe to a "feed" from a web site.
By subscribing to a feed, a user can be notified when a website has been updated.
RSS (Really Simple Syndication) came first, it worked, but was deemed imperfect by many, who decided to
start an alternative project, especially when
Dave Winer declared RSS 2.0 to be "the last version of RSS".
However, the RSS concept was so good that it brought together a wide variety of developers to
develop a new syndication format.
This new format is called Atom and is de facto a competitor to RSS.
The idea behind Atom is ONE FORMAT (Atom) and
ONE PROTOCOL (HTTP).
So, there are now two basic formats for syndicating a web site.
RSS is older with many different versions, Atom is newer,
more standard, and only beginning to be adopted.
Atom was constructed to work across a wide variety of platforms and devices.
Atom and RSS are both tools designed to do the same basic job: advertise and distribute website content
by creating machine-readable XML newsfeeds.
Chances are, your choice of format will be influenced largely by your choice of Content Management System.
Yahoo, for instance, is behind RSS, while Google uses the new Atom (open and not proprietary) format.
Blogs search engines
(The original draft was based on a list from Ari Paparo)
First of all some VERY GOOD BLOG SEARCH ENGINES:
One of the best for discovering interesting blogs: EUREKSTER (blogs)
The music blogs phenomenon