Thing #3 - Blogging 2 (week 2)

I am finding blog searching very time consuming, partly because I get distracted following non-related postings in long trails and have to pull myself back to the task at hand, but partly because, as Lee noted, the uncontrolled and casual nature of the medium means that a lot of the blogs I visited turned out to have little or nothing to do with my topic or were not substantive or not authoritative. But on the positive side the creative serendipity I experienced just following my nose was very refreshing. I just don't see how that serendipity could be productively incorporated into my work life other than allowing myself an hour once a month to blogosphere surf.

I've had bloglines for over a year and find it difficult to even find time to read the new posts on the very small number of blogs that I've decided to watch. I'd like to have a way to find new inspiring blogs to put on my bloglines watch list but it seems to take a lot of time to find a blog that is worth watching, not to mention the time to read it! Thanks very much for the LibDex and LisZen suggestions. When I have a moment I'll try to mine those for decent blogs. They seem more hopeful than the blog search engines I tried. Maybe we should share our very short lists of good blogs among ourselves periodically? So far the academic library blog I find most worth while is Stephen's Lighthouse, by Stephen Abram who is the chair elect of SLA. Its here: http://stephenslighthouse.sirsidynix.com/ What's your favorite?

Of the search engines listed for us to review I liked Ask best. I liked the discernment between posts, feeds and news, and I liked the options to sort by relevance, popularity or most recent. Relevance ranking in blog searching is not that helpful as it is really term weighting which doesn't do as good a job of ranking conversations that are not using controlled vocabulary IMHO. I also liked the top feeds listing on the results page so the feed were specific to your topic. Too bad the subscribe button I tried didn't work. Nice thought though.

Sphere was an interesting and worthy attempt to connect news in mainstream sources with blogs, but its not something I would use regularly. It also was not clear if it was searching blogs or just RSS feeds or what and I got some wonky search results (way fewer hits than seemed likely in some cases).

Technorati was overwhelming and didn't seem to zero in on anything good. At first I liked the fact that it goes to the blog summary page first but then I wasn't finding the summary page that helpful and it became annoying. The directory search was not very helpful with the term "academic libraries" in my opinion. I had more success with the search term for an actual thing (a solatube tubular skylight) in the non-directory search.

This weeks work seemed to take a lot of time. There is just soooooooooo much out there in blogland!