Detlev Johnson of Position Tech moderates this session that gives attendees a chance to hear from representatives who operate major blog and feed (RSS/Atom) search engines and about how they operate. Speakers include: Adam Hertz of Technorati, Mark Fletcher of Bloglines/Ask Jeeves, Chris Redlitz of Feedster, Chris Tolles Topix.net and Jeremy Zawodny of Yahoo! and Vinod Marur from Google.
Walked in on the Technorati Demo being presented by Adam Hertz. Unfortunately, I did not catch Mark Fletcher of Bloglines. Perhaps he'll do a short interview with me later?
Adam Hertz showed new tools available at Technorati.
Filter by authority - Search for a common phrase, many results appear. Use the slider to sort by relevancy. Seems like a minimum of 200 inbounds are necessary to be "relevant".
Blog Finder - Tag based blog directory. Launched a few months ago. Blogs are broken down into categories. Allows you to search only the blogs in the blog finder database.
Favorites - Experiment in social search. When you look at someone's favorites, you see the most recent posts only from that person's favorites. You can also limit your search to that list of blogs. Personalizes the search experience and allows you to share interests. Coming soon, the ability to create and name sets.
Next up is Chris Tolles. Topix is not a blog searh engine, but they feed most blog search engines with data.
Blogs and feeds - the incremental web.
Incremental web - chronologically ordered, RSS feeds, discover relevance from freshness.
Why you should care about RSS? - Topix used to get 5% of taffic from RSS, now 25% is from RSS. - 27,000 new and blog sources - 360,000 topics updated every 10 minutes.
Why includes blogs? Topix looked at the top million blogs. Blogs cover things other news properties don't. It's better to have "more" information.
People have an expectation of interaction. Topix started forums generating 4,000 new posts a day. People want to talk back to the news.
Is it real? - Yahoo and Google investing in news/blogs - Startups, inform.com, digg, newsvine
What are the challenges? - Sorting through new voices - many services, not easy to fake relevance - Create a system of participation - interaction is expected
Next up is Chris Redlitz of Feedster that specializes in feed search, not blog search. 18 months ago, Feedster indexed 865,000 feeds. Shows RocketBoom video talking about the new Feedster design and Feedster blog. Feedster should be at 30 million feeds in the next few months.
Now What? Improved relevancy, fast indexing, content qualification and archival search.
Will be launching a new version of top blogs (Feedster 500) which will be using an algorithmic type of methodology in the next few months. Incidentally, both Search Engine Roundtable and Online Marketing Blog made the Feedster 500 lists last year.
Working hard to improve quality and reduce spam. Filtering incoming spam, Reassess index, spam detection
Publisher Benefit of Feeds. Increase distribution, reduce dependence on email, targeted audience.
Feedster Japan is launching soon as well as other international versions.
Next up is Vinod Marur from Google to present on Google Blog Search. Google launched blog search in September last year with similar experiences as other blog search engines in rate of growth. Google is finding that some blogs are topical, some are time based, some are social platforms. Recency alone is not the best measure of ranking blog posts.
Next up is Jeremy Zawodny from Yahoo.
In 1997 all the buzz was about eyeballs. That didn't last. What is the new potential for "eyeballs" and revenue? It's less about eyeballs and more about attention. Some of the changes are as a result of technology. Increasingly, people who used to visit many web sites are now subscribing to content using RSS feeds. A feed reader is an attention focusing tool.
The growth of RSS use is an indication of the growth of the web.
Definition of Attention: "Concentration of the mental powers upon an object or close careful observing or listening." Not much like traditional "surfing" and randomly finding content.
Another definition: "Your suggestion (message) has come to our attention." Isn't that what you want as a marketer?
Yahoo blog search is different than Technorati and Feedster. Yahoo decided that when people search Yahoo News, that would be the best place to incorporate blog results.
Meme Tracking on del.icio.us, memeorandum, TailRank, Digg, Reddit, etc. This is a new phenomena.
My Yahoo offers RSS support and feed search.
What to do? Check out the Publisher's Guide to RSS Also: http://rss.yahoo.com http://publisher.yahoo.com
Audience: How to monetize a blog Jeremy - You can add an advertisement to the feed. There's also a school of thought that considers the RSS feed an ad for the content on the blog.
SES NYC Tag: sesny2006
