We’ve made available our blog directory and search engine at BlogStreet.com. Its a very, very preliminary effort, and there will be a lot of things which we will be doing in the coming weeks. But, it’s a start. We’ve cataloged about 150 blogs so far, but this number will go up in the coming days.
A word on the search as it is now: we bot the top pages of the blogs cataloged and do a keyword search on it. Even though this is quite primitive, it can be quite helpful to track what bloggers are talking about — unlike Blogdex and Daypop which focus only on the links. We’ll also be adding our own link analysis soon.
The view of BlogStreet in the coming months is to create a site which can help in identifying clusters of bloggers and people. We want to use some of the ideas of “Emergence” and see what can come out of these applied to blogs.
Some initial thinking: Blogs have a combination of “friends” (blogrolls), their entries (the blog posts) which have a mix of links and words, and in some cases, comments. Google looks at the pages as a whole, and its PageRank technology does not (at least from what I have read) distinguish between the links on a page.
In the context of Blogs, this differentiation needs to be done: links at the top of a BlogRoll are more “friendlier” than the ones at the bottom. Also, stories “decay” as one moves lower down the index page — they become older. A search engine for Blogs will need to keep in mind the unique structure of blogs, and make use of the archive pages also (with the permalinks).
Blogs are what the Web should have been in the first place: about people talking about their interests and areas of expertise, on a regular basis. Its been a fascinating ride for me, personally, in the last few months because blogs (more so, bloggers) have helped bring about a richer understanding of the various happenings and innovations that are going on around us.
Blogs give the underdogs a chance to get known — using the power of ideas and knowledge. Websites never did create a level playing field; Blogs can.
