Spontaneous Monotony

Google has launched its own competitor to the popular Technorati blog indexing site. The rather plainly titled Google Blog Search spiders the RSS feeds of sites that ping weblogs.com (and ‘other sites’, which aren’t specified). It currently has no means of submitting a feed manually (though the site claims this is coming soon) so if your blogging tool doesn’t support weblogs.com-type (XML-RPC) pings, then you are screwed (hint: most decent blogging tools, including MT and Wordpress, do). Aside from the indexing issue, there are some other imperfections in the system:

• The relatively small amount of content – at the moment it only indexes posts from June 2005 onwards (presumably when they got the spider working, incidentally I was wondering why my RSS feeds were getting so many hits :P) – with one site even claiming that it only offers 1/4 as many blogs as technorati
• Not integrated with the main Google interface the way that Images, News, Froogle etc. are – so people have to type in a different URL (and know it in the first place) to search it

At the moment, it doesn’t seem to be what blog-haters have been calling far (ie removing blogs from the main index, which to be fair to Google would be pretty damn difficult seeing as many use the same CMS tools as other types of website) – whether or not that’s a good thing depends on your point of view, although since you are reading this in a blog I’ll presume you’re not a blog hater

See Also

• BBC News: Google unveils blog search site
• Googleblog post about Blog Search

The BBC is reporting that News Corp (Rupert Murdoch’s company) have bought IGN for $650m. This wouldn’t normally get a mention except that IGN own Gamespy, who run the Battlefield 2 stats system. Whether the purchase will affect how IGN operates any of its subsidiaries remains to be seen of course.

According to Reporters San Frontières (Reporters Without Borders), Yahoo has been directly assisting the Chinese regime in the oppression of legitimate journalism:

…does the fact that this corporation operates under Chinese law free it from all ethical considerations ? How far will it go to please Beijing ?”

Reporters Without Borders added : “Information supplied by Yahoo ! led to the conviction of a good journalist who has paid dearly for trying to get the news out. It is one thing to turn a blind eye to the Chinese government’s abuses and it is quite another thing to collaborate.” …

What Yahoo does is entirely its choice, but anyone with any sort of ethical problem with this also has the choice to:

• Stop using the Yahoo site – search engine, email etc.
• Uninstall any Yahoo software they have on their computer (Desktop Search, Konfabulator etc.)
• Make sure that Yahoo is not allowed to simply get away with this, and ensure that as many people as possible are told about it

As TheBlogHerald points out, it isn’t just spinelessness that is making Yahoo interested in becoming an organ of state terror:

A US-based multinational, Yahoo! Appears to be willing to go to any lengths to gain shares of the Chinese market and it is investing heavily in local companies. In 2003, it spent 120 million dollars to buy the search engine 3721.com. More recently Yahoo! acquired a large stake in the Internet giant Alibaba in an operation that reportedly cost nearly a billion dollars. Reporters Without Borders has written several times to Yahoo! executives in an attempt to alert it to the ethical issues raised by its Chinese investments. These letters have so far received no answer.

Technorati has announced a new Blog Finder feature. You’re probably familiar with the way that Technorati offers a list of blogs that have posts marked with a particular ‘Tag’ (if you’re not, click one of the tags on this post as an example), ordered by how recent the posts are.

Now, you can discard that post-specificness and relevance and just search for blogs that are marked with a particular tag. You don’t know what the actual posts will be about, or even if there ARE any (unlike normal tags, these ones aren’t tied to posts in any way), and what specifically the posts are about. For example, if you went to the ‘Games’ tag page, you would get a short excerpt of each post so that you could find the specific content you were looking for, even if the posts weren’t tagged very specifically.

The blog tracker also worsens some inherent flaws with the whole tagging concept, by making your choice of variation on a particular tag (e.g. using ‘Computers and Internet’ or separate ‘Computers’ and ‘Internet’ tags) as Josh Hallet explains:

The initial version of the listings was built by using category and tag data that blogs had already submitted. Right out of the box, the lists are very BETA. For example, some bloggers use the category ‘PR’ instead of ‘Public Relations’. As such, Neville Hobson’s blog is listed as the Most Authorative blog on ‘PR’ but is nowhere to be found on the list for ‘Public Relations’ blogs. This blog is listed as the 11th Most Authorative Blog for ‘Public Relations’ and ‘PR’. Jeremy Pepper would get a kick out of this since he and I have talked about the fact that I’m not really a true PR blogger

I am also listed as the Most Authorative blog for ‘Orlando’ even though I rarely write about Orlando. Why? I guess becuase I have tagged more posts Orlando than other bloggers.

All considered, a wonderful, totally necessary new feature from technorati that will dramatically improve blogging for authors and readers (sic).

I just discovered that, when I switched to MT 3.2, the wonderfully designed upgrade system kept all of my MT 3.17 templates. I can understand the reasoning behind it – that people who have spent ages customising their HTML will not want it overwritten – but there is one minor problem with this: MT 3.17 templates are incompatible with the new version, the template structure has changed completely! This is what caused some of the strangeness you might have noticed – such as comments having no discernible start and end points, archive pages leaking into the coloured background etc. I had to go through every in-use template (removing anything wrapped in the MT_TRANS function which doesn’t actually seem to work at all) and copy-paste the MT 3.2 version from my downloaded ZIP file, but it’s done now and it should work fine.