A Search Engine For Irish Blogs - 2

A central resource for the Irish blogosphere is evidently needed. From the discussion on the Connecting The Irish Blogosphere post, determining what is and is not an Irish related blog is going to be difficult but the interconnectedness of blogs is a very useful aspect compared to ordinary business websites. A business website is less likely to have links to other sites. A blog, on the other hand, tends to rely on linking to other blogs.

Over the last week or so, I’ve been doing the preliminary work on building the search engine for the Irish blogosphere. The linkage structure for a blog search engine is quite different to that of an ordinary website search engine. An ordinary search engine links websites - a blogosphere search engine links people. The hierarchical model of links and authority hubs does not work well. Sure you’ve got the star bloggers but to concentrate solely on that aspect is wrong - it is the old model of authoritative hubs and trickle down relevancy. The key aspect of blog sites are the posts rather than the blog site itself. The discussions and referrals generally concern posts and articles rather than websites.

The lifetime of a blog post discussion is brief varying from a few hours to a few weeks. This makes it somewhat different to the ordinary web and triggered (blog ping or monitoring) spidering is necessary. It may be necessary to split the search engine into a historical search and a current search.

The search engine will provide the infrastructure but the resource will also extract topics under active discussion and show the linkages. In some respects it would be a meta-blog but the the topic and post monitoring will be automated. It will effectively provide a single page (or maybe more than one page) insight into what is going on in the Irish blogosphere.

Tags: , , Irish Search Engines

Written by John McCormac on March 7th, 2005 with comments disabled.
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Get your own gravatar by visiting gravatar.com Tom Raftery
#1. March 7th, 2005, at 5:11 PM.

Cool John - an Irish Blogosphere Zeitgeist - the historical part of this will become more and more interesting as a reference to how topics and opinions shift over time.