CIL2006: Notes from my blog searching talk First - it was a great turnout. Thanks, too, to my friends from "the government" who came to see me and all of the other friends in the audience.

I spent probably a little more time than strictly necessary placing my talk in the context of the conference and library world, but I thought it was important to emphasize (repeatedly) that all librarians in all settings should be competent in searching the internet using advanced features and should be at least familiar with searching blog content as it is 1) valuable 2) structured and different from searching the general web. One thing I hadn't thought of was brought up by an audience member: law firm librarians should be able to do this to look for what's being said about high profile cases and clients, too.

For blog specific search engines, I mentioned some general caveats:

1. may only search feeds
2. splogs
3. short time coverage

I showed Technorati

• Technorati
• authority slider = times linked to in their database
  
• Technorati popular books
• Product news: Razr technical component problem
• Graph of mentions
• Clusty's Blog search
• reviews of Mazeppa
• Fun thing (may use bad language:) ) - www.opinmind.com
  

For general search engines:
Please see the handout (pg12 in the proceedings or archived here).

• Almost semantic web -- lots of fields that can be mined and structures that can be used.
• Blogs link back to the source of the software & MSN search allows you to do keyword with link. Try, for example, razr link:wordpress.org
• make use of inurl:archive, inurl:blog, inurl:yyyy/mm where yyyy is 4-digit year, mm is 2-digit month

Greg "open stacks" Schwartz had a great session on podcasts. My notes are at home, though, so I'll try to post something later on that.

CIL2006  ¶ 12:30 PM| |cites (technorati) |