Liveblogging the BBS: Monitoring RSS and the Blogosphere

These are some quick (OK, so they’re somewhat long) notes from today’s session on RSS and feeds: Monitoring the Blogosphere and the Buzz. It’s being given by Dave Taylor and Halley Suitt at the moment, because the third speaker is stuck in a cab. Ok there she is: Mary Hodder.

• Blogging and RSS are not necessarily the same thing - there are RSS feeds that aren’t created by blogs or blog software
• There are tons of tools to browse through the blogosphere. Technorati is Dave’s favorite tool. He just searched for “photographer” in the blog directory, and it found 387 blogs self-categorized as being in the “photography” area.
• In Technorati, you can decide whether to sort by freshness or authority. Authority is essentially based on the number of inbound links a blog has. Now you can see which blogs are linked to (seen as authoritative) frequently.
• Using a Technorati search in blog posts will let you filter your search by authority and from what blogs (Technorati is having problems now - the live demo is…problematic). So you can search for the word “camera” in “all blogs” with “some authority.”
• Google Blogsearch does a better job of cutting out splogs because they don’t admit blogs that have zero inbound links.
• You can subscribe to RSS feeds of Technorati searches (to see if anyone is talking about “bubble gum”) and keep a constant eye on what’s being said.
• Dave says that Newsgator can be used to arrange a bunch of feeds so that you can have what’s been promised for almost a decade - a personalized newspaper. If you’re not using a news aggregator, then you’re not keeping up on your industry, and you have a “huge problem.”

Mary takes the podium (figuratively) to talk about live web search.

• Why do you get different search results from different search services?
• Google was created for the static web; pagerank is a measure of people’s interest in a certain site, and Google leveraged pagerank (links, essentially) to make keyword search work. It went and found the “most relevant” site based on pagerank.
• So new search (blogsearch) brings in key word matches, but in reverse chronological order. The new search, Link Search, yields everything that has linked to a url.
• The different types of searches are good for different types of content: static search (the first one) is best for a static-type page (a bank’s home site), live search is better for rapidly changing content like that on blogs.
• Bloglines keeps all links from all the time they’ve existed, but Technorati only keeps incoming links for 6 months. (Which, to me, makes sense - you don’t want to give an unhealthy weight to blogs that have been around forever or blogs that are no longer active).
• Alexa provides a flawed metric because it counts visits to a site based on a toolbar that is voluntarily installed on Internet Explorer browsers only.
• For a complete picture, you should look for the number of inbound links, the number of comments, the frequency of blogging a topic, RSS subscribers, and tagged URLs - like in del.icio.us
• Mary says that to monitor the blogosphere, you should look for posts and comments that follow conversations within a sphere of blogging, in addition to individual, unconnected posts.

Now Halley is taking a turn to speak:

• How do you go about finding RSS feeds on sites that you aren’t sure have feeds. CNN, for example: One way to do it is to look for the little orange chicklet that says XML, RSS, or something like that. It’s often crazy difficult to find
• There is a question about IE7: is IE support of RSS bring RSS closer to adoption. Dave Taylor says he thinks it’s an irrelevant blip. Unless they promote that as a main feature (say when you come to a site with an RSS feed, IE pops up and say “would you like to subscribe?”), then it would be significant.
• Question: What’s the deal with reposting/reblogging feeds? Answer: Use a short feed for commercial use - in other words, don’t allow people to grab the whole article via RSS, people have to go to your site to get the full thing.
• Monitor your company name use on FlickR
• Question: how do you get a feed from a site, rich with content, not offering a feed? Answer: Well, Mary thinks you should respect their choice not to have a feed. But you could also hack the robots.txt and create an RSS feed for the site, although that’s somewhat technical. You could also use Google Alerts (searches google for a phrase, grabs the top 500 results, and then brings the new items to you in an RSS feed).