{"id":848,"date":"2005-08-07T11:48:45","date_gmt":"2005-08-07T16:48:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=848"},"modified":"2005-08-07T11:48:45","modified_gmt":"2005-08-07T16:48:45","slug":"blog-search-tell-me-something-i-dont-know","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/?p=848","title":{"rendered":"Blog search: Tell me something I don’t know"},"content":{"rendered":"

I got an email about a new blog search engine called Blogniscient<\/a>, so I clicked through to try it.
\nOn the home page, it tells me that the top 10 political bloggers are:
\n#1 Michelle Malkin
\n#2 Captains Quarter Blog
\n#3 Eschaton
\n#4 Powerline
\n#5 Crooks and Liars
\n#6 Austin Bay
\n#7 Think Progress
\n#8 TPM Caf�
\n#9 The Anchoress
\n#10 Daily Kos
\nYou can drill down and find the top liberal and conservative blogs. Two clicks later, I find that the top liberal bloggers are (the list goes to 20):
\nLiberal Politics
\n#1 Crooks and Liars
\n#2 The Left Coaster
\n#3 Eschaton
\n#4 Think Progress
\n#5 Daily Kos
\n#6 TPM Caf�
\n#7 Talking Points Memo
\n#8 Political Animal
\n#9 The Huffington Post
\n#10 America Blog
\nSo please, Mr. Search Engine. Tell me something I don’t know. I knew that Daily Kos and Atrios\/Exchaton were very popular. I had no idea that Atrios was two places ahead of Kos, and… I don’t care. It’s not like baseball heading up to the playoffs, where there’s going to be a single winner.
\nWhere are the good centrist blogs, like The Moderate Voice and Ambivablog? They don’t fit into the impoverished taxonomy, let alone sites like Booker Rising, a site focused on moderate-to-conservative African-Americans.
\nHere’s the problem. The top 40 blog list is boring. It’s stable. We know who they are. The job of a search engine is to tell the user something they don’t already know.
\nSplitting up the top 100 into big themes is somewhat more interesting than the general-purpose Technorati 100. It’s more meaningful to look at top political blogs, sci\/tech blogs, entertainment blogs. But it’s still stable, and doesn’t convey much new information.
\nThe top news stories is a bit more interesting, since that churns daily. That’s an interesting zeitgeist check, and may be worth checking back.
\nThe bulk of the site misses the glory of the web. With a vast amount of human knowledge there for the mining, please tell me something I didn’t know already<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I got an email about a new blog search engine called Blogniscient, so I clicked through to try it. On the home page, it tells me that the top 10 political bloggers are: #1 Michelle Malkin #2 Captains Quarter Blog #3 Eschaton #4 Powerline #5 Crooks and Liars #6 Austin Bay #7 Think Progress #8 … Continue reading “Blog search: Tell me something I don’t know”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-social-software"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/prDRq-dG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/848\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.alevin.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}