How to Find New Blogs
Published Monday, April 7th, 2008 in Uncategorized
Raj Bala wrote an excellent blog on enterprise IT so I followed him closely when he went to launch his startup, BigSwerve. BigSwerve indexed millions of blog comments and had front end tools for browsing the commentosphere. It had promise of being the best method to find new blogs. The BigSwerve tool that I frequently used was a search interface that would accept a blog URL and then return the URLs left by commentors on that blog. You could also do the inverse with the API — in other words where does a given person comment. Actually they were indexing all the commentor data, not just the URL, measuring the extroverted nature and engagement level of people — sort of the inverse of PageRank. Relevant people to your interests, versus the traditional algorithm of grading by inbound links. They were also launching a widget that would increase comments using the intelligence from their comment database. For good reasons, BigSwerve was acquired by Lijit. The tools I just described are no longer available from Lijit, but Lijit does have a fun tool to find other blogs. Check out Lijit because they also have a great search engine (increases page views and conversion) that is customizable, easy to setup and to add to your site. So what are we left with now to find new blogs?
ReadWriteWeb covers various approaches for finding new blogs. In my opinion, the best approach is the time spendy one of following link trails from your favorite blogs’ blogrolls, comments. Weeding though google on keywords of interest is still one of the most effective approaches to find new blogs. These fairly manual best practices guarantee long nights of browsing and signal an opportunity for a technology company to give us a superior product. The commenting companies (e.g. Disqus) or ratings (e.g OutBrain) seem like obvious candidates to develop blog search similar to BigSwerve, but I don’t think they have a head start over any other company because it is not obvious their technology can index blogs outside of where their code is embedded.
Providing a standard presentation of blog characteristics once you find a blog is another needed solution. For example, a technology that generates an organized landing page that shows me blogroll, list of commentors, mybloglog community, linkedin contacts, friendfeed stuff, posting stats, bio and other blog stats.