Connecting The Irish Blogosphere

fmk
#1. February 28th, 2005, at 10:38 AM.

how do you identify an irish blog?

i do think some “central resource” would be useful, for a variety of different reasons (prime among them to add a bit of strength to the irish blogosphere) but i’m not sure a search engine is that resource.

there is some playing with the “irishblogs” tag on technorati, but it’s not really seeping through (i’ve toyed with it, but don’t like it).

John McCormac
#2. February 28th, 2005, at 10:55 AM.

Identifying an Irish blog is the hard part but in some respects it is not that different to the stuff that WhoisIreland.com has been doing with Irish websites. The usual IP based detection methods are probably not going to be much good on this due to the way that blogs are hosted.

The search engine would be heavily integrated with its own blog subdirectory section. It would provide update data for each listed blog.

I’m still not convinced that the Technorati tags are the most viable method. From what I can see they are a categorisation add-on for Technorati rather than something of use to the blogger. Convincing bloggers to use tags is probably going to be as difficult as convincing ordinary websites to use meta data.

fmk
#3. February 28th, 2005, at 8:49 PM.

does my site rate as irish on whois ireland?

the technorati tags thing is - the more i think about it - totally wrong. if they had a tag system (some add-in toolbar maybe) whereby i could tag your posts on you, i think that would be more effective. to get bloggers to use tags will require changes in the blogging interfaces to make adding them as easy as clicking buttons.

Gavin
#4. March 1st, 2005, at 1:19 AM.

Im not convinced about tags yet, they are fine early on, but seem to get flooded very quickly. I would guesstimate that outside the livejournal family there are circa 70-100 Irish blogs, about 60 of which I know of.

Bernie Goldbach
#5. March 1st, 2005, at 6:02 AM.

Last year, I listed 88 LiveJournal Irish blogs and 45 Irish or quasi-Irish blogs. I could count on daily updates from 50 of those blogs. More than 100 updated twice a week. At least 15 were inactive–no posting for several months. If you crawled once before noon and again at 10 PM, you would get most of the Irish babble for a day’s viewing. A one-stop service that scraped and presented back self-organising memes would be an intelligent folksonomy of discussion in the Irish blogosphere.

John McCormac
#6. March 1st, 2005, at 8:17 AM.

“Im not convinced about tags yet, they are fine early on, but seem to get flooded very quickly.”
I noticed that with Technorati tags Gavin,
Those blogs updating most frequently with the tags seem to get to the top of the pile. Though on the other hand, the update frequency of blogs varies considerably.

I would guesstimate that outside the livejournal family there are circa 70-100 Irish blogs, about 60 of which I know of.”

That is a comparatively small number of blogs. In the first few days of each month I have to check about 100,000 Irish owned and operated domain names and their associated websites. Handling that small a number of blogs would be easy enough but it is the update frequency that is the most critical part of getting it right. Tags would make it somewhat easier but having seen how meta data can be gamed from a search engine operator point of view, I think that they are more for rough classification than categorisation.

John McCormac
#7. March 1st, 2005, at 8:41 AM.

“Last year, I listed 88 LiveJournal Irish blogs and 45 Irish or quasi-Irish blogs. I could count on daily updates from 50 of those blogs. More than 100 updated twice a week. At least 15 were inactive–no posting for several months. If you crawled once before noon and again at 10 PM, you would get most of the Irish babble for a day’s viewing.”

It is a enough small index to do it on that basis Bernie,
On the update side of things, using comparisons with the RSS or Atom feeds could allow for a pre-spider check.

“A one-stop service that scraped and presented back self-organising memes would be an intelligent folksonomy of discussion in the Irish blogosphere.”

That’s what I have in mind. The search engine would underpin the system. The link structure is what I am trying to work out because it will allow the threads of discussion in the blogosphere to become visible. I don’t want to go above the simple link/date/count structure to the classification layer just yet. But the linking structure of a series of blog articles and how the refer to each other may make a Folksonomy a lot easier to build than a proper Semantic Web structure.

Tom Raftery
#8. March 1st, 2005, at 9:46 AM.

defining what is Irish or Irish related is as difficult as for any other country

I have to agree John - my own blog is Irish owned, Irish hosted (in DEG in Dublin) and yet the content is almost entirely tech related and so could be anywhere. Is this an Irish blog?

John McCormac
#9. March 1st, 2005, at 11:07 AM.

The tag idea is beginning to be a little strange because when bloggers are separating their posts into categories on their sites, the are using a form of latent tagging.

The tags strucure that Technorati is implementing are more to create a dynamically updating directory rather than a search engine. The keywords aspect of Technorati is more search engine orientated. In some respects it is updating the concept of Dmoz where website owners submit their websites for inclusion. The submission side of things is automatic with Technorati being included in the pings from most blogging software.

Twenty Major - tags are ugly and they do disrupt the design and flow of the articles. The main meta data is hidden for this good reason.

Tom - That’s the kind of question that gives country based search engine operators nightmares. When a search engine moves beyond simple domain and IP classification, the next step up is to use WHOIS data. Unfortunately this data is not 100% reliable. A blogging search engine could be a move beyond a normal search engine in that it would be trying to categorise people rather than websites.

John McCormac
#10. March 1st, 2005, at 11:17 AM.

It is at the top of the list Twenty Major,
the hard part is in determining that the blog is Irish owned.
A lot of Irish blogs that I’ve seen are hosted outside of Ireland and Irish IP space. They also don’t have distinct domain names such as www. exampleblog .com that would show up on the lists of domains (part of the work here is in checking these lists each month for new Irish owned and operated domains and the number of com/net/org/biz/info/ie domains is approximately 40 million.) I’d like to see a distinct .blog top level domain just like .com as it would make things a lot easier. With a small number of Irish blogs it is possible to manually check them but when it goes beyond a few thousand, the process has to be automated.

John McCormac
#11. March 1st, 2005, at 12:19 PM.

It is a good idea and should work. As long as they put the link/graphic on their blog, it would make building an Irish blogger index a lot easier.

Tom Raftery
#12. March 1st, 2005, at 12:44 PM.

Irish owned = Irish blog, surely?

That’s certainly one definition Twenty and it works well for your site which is very Irish in terms of content as well as ownership. However, in the case of my blog, I don’t see that tagging it as Irish adds any benefit for the reader.

John McCormac
#13. March 1st, 2005, at 1:21 PM.

“The fact that I only have to add the post to my “IrishBlogs” category to do this does make it push button simple and not ugly IMHO. That’s on TypePad anyway.” Then TypePad makes it a lot easier and obvious and that is a good thing. Most webpages with meta data hide all but the page title from the reader. Typepad, from what I’ve read is a feature rich operation. The idea that tags are ugly is more of an aesthetic one. On a well designed page, they are unobtrusive. However they can break the flow of information to the reader by forcing them to wonder what they mean.

Bernard
#14. March 1st, 2005, at 1:51 PM.

I guess it depends on “what Irish is?”
If Irish means Irish owned/run, then that would be down to IP, host location, WHOIS records, where poster is located.

If Irish means Irish relevant content (related to tech/art/culture/politics in Ireland), then I guess you hve to do some page ranking, to see how related to Ireland the content is. I am thinking along the lines of Google PR, not for popularity, but more for Irishness. Thats where things, I guess would get hard.
Who’s to say whats Irish content, and whats not?

What about adding a central Irish blogging server to ping?
Wordpress comes preconfigured with http://rpc.pingomatic.com/, http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping, http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/ as servers to update.

I have not done a manual install/system wide install of Wordpress, but surely its possible to add, I don’t know, blogping.whoisireland.com to that list of servers to ping?

The idea of the image, meh, reminicient [sp?] of Doras ranking.
And you have to rely on the poster to add that to their code.

Its not an easy thing to do correctly, John. But if you are going to look at it, I hope you succeed. Might be interesting to publicise it, get others interested.

I think an important part would be to get enough people convinced that it was a good idea.

my .02c
bBt

John McCormac
#15. March 2nd, 2005, at 8:23 PM.

Hosting in Ireland is a lot cheaper than it was. A lot of Irish domains have moved back here in recent years. Digital Crocus is actually a UK company that hosts in US IP space. This is not an uncommon thing - any country’s hosting business will have a percentage of their business hosted outside its IP space.

A quick check of .com domain names with “blog” as part of them shows 34338 domains. However many of these are speculative registrations and often blogs won’t have the word “blog” as part of the domain. That is even if they have their own domain name. Most don’t and this can make them harder to detect. There is an interesting possibility that the growth in domains where the associated nameserver only has one domain name (that domain) associated with it are to some extent blog domain names.

Tom Raftery
#16. March 3rd, 2005, at 12:41 AM.

Personally I host in Ireland because I like to know that the people I host with are at the end of a phone during my working hours, if something goes pear-shaped.

Now, in the case of my hosters (Blacknight - www.blacknight.ie), I frewuently call/email them at nasty hours of the day/night and at weekends with frivolous/esoteric queries and they generally respond within the hour (and often sooner).

bernard
#17. March 3rd, 2005, at 12:52 AM.

John,
i don’t think that the definition of irish can be left up to the operator totally. the se operator’s definition maybe different than the general opinion.

Irish: Of or relating to Ireland or its people, language, or culture.

So your going to have to look at the ping/subscription/topics/location, not necessarily in the order, but i think that would be pretty spot on.

I don’t honestly think that location can be ranked to highly, as cost would probably be a factor to someone who hosts with blogger, or some low cost hoster.

As gavin said, people will have to blog about it, to make people think about what is actually “irish”.

bernard

John McCormac
#18. March 3rd, 2005, at 1:07 AM.

Yep Bernard,
The definition of Irish or Irish related is going to be the most difficult part of this.

The location aspect is less important than it would be with geolocating websites because the typical blogger site is not a business site with a hosting budget. A blog is more likely to be hosted with blogspot or blogger or Typepad.

From the stuff I’ve been testing, the link structure of a blogosphere search engine is somewhat different to that of an ordinary website search engine. An ordinary search engine links websites a blogosphere search engine links people.

Tom Raftery
#19. March 3rd, 2005, at 8:26 AM.

An ordinary search engine links websites a blogosphere search engine links people.

Wow! It sounds simple and obvious but that is an amazingly powerful concept John.

fmk
#20. March 3rd, 2005, at 9:23 PM.

but for such a site to be meaningful i think it needs to be more than simply a listing. there needs to be some way to express the popularity/importance/value - and not just in terms of links in - of sites. maybe a meta-blog is what is called for.

hostyle
#21. March 4th, 2005, at 10:49 PM.

What makes a site a blog? I know of countless online journals by irish people that get updated regularly / periodically or in some cases just once a year. Some use “blogging software”, some roll their own and others update static pages. Whats so important except “its easier for me to see if somethings changed when I use software so you should too” about “blogs”? This whole gung-ho attitude of “my site is a blog and yours isn’t” is a load of cack. Please give it a rest people.

Carol Ann Lynch
#22. March 9th, 2005, at 12:43 PM.

Just began a blog at Blogspot.com. Am Irish, living in London. Would have used Irish hoster, if I could have found one, am interested if anyone knows of such a host?

my blog at www.ainelivia.blogspot.com all welcome

Carol Ann Lynch
#23. March 9th, 2005, at 12:45 PM.

One of the best around is dervala.net. Brilliant Ireland in archive

John McCormac
#24. March 9th, 2005, at 1:07 PM.

Two Irish hosters have been offering free Irish blog hosting - Irishblogs.com and blogsome.com appear to use Wordpress.