From Bookmarks to Blog Posts to Search

You thought they were all separate activities, didn't you?  Well, after a conversation with Greg Gershman of Blogdigger, introducing him to Hjalmar Gislason of Spurl and Zniff and a bit more thinking inside my own head, I've connected them together.

First off, both of these guys have some exciting things going on - which I am not at liberty to discuss. And this is a bit more elaboration of an idea that I shared with Greg, that I am sure I am not the first person to come up with. After I introduced Greg and Hjalmar, I started thinking about how they could both implement this idea about 10x more effectively, if they did it together. 

A bit of background:
1. I use delicious and spurl to log my bookmarks. I am logging things that I find interesting, but because of time constraints, I am not blogging about most of the things I  bookmark. But, most of the time I intend to. I also use these services to keep track of things I want to reference later for projects and business.
2. I blog about the things that really catch my fancy.
3. I use technorati, bloglines and my weblog referers to see who is linking to me (talking about/to me)
4. Occasionally, I use feedster, waypath, technorati and blogdigger to search for timely topics and things I know are covered on weblogs.
5. I subscribe to a few pubsub alerts and blogdigger feeds to monitor some things.
6. I use google to find stuff that I know is out there, that I've seen before and want to find again.
7. I use bloglines and the blogrolls on the blogs I read to find new people to read.
8. I use blogads to promote my projects on friends' weblogs and let them do the same on my blog. I also make a few bucks through that and a few pennies through google adsense.

What I thought of today that isn't covered by one of these services.... that I think blogdigger, spurl and zniff could build in a matter of days if they combined their capabilities is:

A way to identify who I link to most often in my weblog posts. And a way for me to see who Marc Canter or John Battelle or Steve Rubel links to most often.  One of the main things I use my weblog to do - is build my social network.  Technorati enables me to see who links to me and who links to Marc, but unless I read through a years worth of posts, I can't tell that Marc Canter links to J.D. Lasica and me more than other people. I can't tell who Marc is following. Who Marc likes the most.

So, here's how it should be done. And I imagine that there are a handful of blog search tools that could pull this off. But, since I spoke to Greg and Hjalmar today and these are the two guys in this business that seem most open to innovating on the fly... I am pitching the idea in the context of what they do.

So....
1. Let me search who I, as a blogger, link to most frequently. Let me search who Marc Canter links-to most frequently. Do this using blogdigger's database.
2. Let me import that into delicious or spurl, so I can search and tag it there. (And benefit from other people's tagging.)
3. Get that data searchable by zniff. Let me have a search box on my website. Now, I have my own search engine of hand selected links. Which comes back to what Eurekster was trying to do. Only now, it is a natural byproduct of blogging.

That's it.

What this really does... is help me navigate my social network. If I know that I want to warm up to Nick Denton, I can now tell very quickly what bloggers he respects and what stuff he is interested in. And knowing is half the battle.

Comments

[The Peter Files]

OK,

I think I have all that. At least if I post a comment here I should be able to find this page again - unless putting in my email address results in a copy of this post and your article going to me. I looked for an email icon and did not find it but what the hey its getting late.

Nah, I'll just bookmark you.

Found you from Andrew that's ranting about McGruder and the McDonalds thing.

Looks like this is a good place for a newbie blogger me to learn a lot more about Blogging.

Peter, The Peter Files
Founder
The International School For Blog Repair Technicians

Our Motto:

We Sit At Home And Fix Your Blog So You Can Watch Desparate Housewives Instead

http://thepeterfiles.blogspot.com/2005/04/you-too-can-enter-world-of-internet.html

[Hjalmar Gislason]

Good stuff Peter.

Isn't this largely the same as we discussed way back here: http://worcester.typepad.com/pc4media/2004/07/technorati_is_n.html

But allowing a blogger to start his Spurl.net collection using the links from his or her blog is a very cool idea. Maybe we should offer that as yet another format to import from...

How about a big idea: A search engine that you set the "base" or "center" for, i.e. I want to search the web for information about "event planning". I know your blog and trust you on the matter. I type in the phrase and set your blog's url as the "base" for the search, meaning that when ranking the results, it will give extra weight to sites that you link to, a little less to the pages that are 2 tiers away from you and so on. A sort of PageRank-on-the-fly thing.

There's something there...

[peter caputa]

Hjalmar,
That's what eurekster does. I think it could be a feature in a future search engine. The problem I see is that with different searches, I am interested in different things. Eurekster solved that issue by having search parties. But, they haven't really taken off, as of yet. You and Greg need a game changing innovation.

Importing the blog links is one step. I also think you need to do some analysis on top of those links that automatically create a blogroll of sorts: that automatically rank which bloggers I link to most and possible the frequency over time.

The more I think about it, the more the discovery and analysis that can occurr from this data is the most important. Not the ability to search it. I use most of the blog/bookmark sites for discovery of new things. Not for searching things. You need to bring the zeitgeist down to the personal level. The more analytical things I have at my fingertips, the more I can intelligently discover things.

-Pete