Thing 3—Blogging 2

Surveying the blog search engines:

Technorati--good differentiation between search results obtained through keyword (searches all blog entries) and the Blog Directory Search (results based on major blog topics = subject headings!). Keyword and Tag searches seem to produce, unhelpfully, nearly identical results.
Fine for finding library-related blogs--i found Library Juice magazine's (progressive librarian journal), as well as over 100 others from various individual bloggers. Didn't like, though, the fact that using the back button erases entered search terms. Display of video and photo blogs didn't always work in Firefox; did in IE.

BlogScope--although it searches less blogs than Technorati, the popularity curves are genius, not only indicating when a topic was being searched by others but--with the GeoSearch (available from the zoomed version of the popularity curve)--where the the searches emanated. This would be useful information for any researcher. Why in March and April were there suddenly lots of queries about 'elections' and 'Turkmenistan'? Blogscope's highlighting of queries looks like a good starting point for further investigation of a topic.

Sphere--nothing fancy, no advanced searching for instance, with a specific purpose: to search blogs about news events. This is very timely as the line between traditional news media and blogging journalism blurs.

Ask Blogs--poor old Jeeves: a victim of the hipness of Web 2.0. Ask.com is obviously getting into Google territory, with not only blog searching but also images, video, news, maps, &c. It has to be said though that this incarnation of Ask is much more useful than Ask Jeeves ever was. I like that results can be sorted by relevance (default), recentness, or popularity--the latter two crucial in winnowing what could be an overwhelming number of results on a given search.

As far as searching library-related topics, i looked for 'library as place', both alone and combined with 'interior design'. Sphere, being news-oriented, was not of much use here, but the others all provided results. BlogScope out-shone the rest though, with far more results from which to choose.