Thing 3: Blog Search Tools

Well, I definitely learned some things from Thing 3.  I had never heard of Technorati or Ice Rocket (Rocket Dogs, yes...Ice Rocket, no), and I honestly had no idea that there were ways to specifically search just blogs.  I guess it's one of those things that I haven’t needed to do, so I never really thought about it before. 

In an effort to compare blog search tools, I decided to search for a blog that I read about over the weekend in People.  I could remember the generalities about the blog (a man was raising his child alone after his wife died from a blood clot just hours after the birth of their daughter) but none of the specifics (his name, her name, the baby’s name, the blog name).  I started with Technorati and searched using different search terms until I found the blog.  It required four Technorati searches before I located the blog.  (Searches for “single father” and “People magazine” seemed to get me nothing but blog entries about Ricky Martin, Kevin Federline and The Bachelor.)  I made notes about each of the four searches I did, and then I moved on to Google Blog Search.  I repeated each of the four searches, and I was able to find the blog with every one of them.  In three of them, the blog was on the first screen of hits, and in the other it was on the second screen of hits.  I also tried the searches on Ice Rocket and was able to locate the blog I was looking for with two of the four searches.  I looked at Sphere, too, but I couldn’t even immediately figure out how to do a search on Sphere.

Based on my searching experiment, I will probably use Google Blog Search in the future even though some of the other options have cooler names.  Technorati did have some features that I liked, like its Top 100 Blogs list and its listing of popular blogs.  From Technorati I learned that, although I didn’t realize it, I do follow a blog almost daily.  CNN’s Political Ticker is apparently a blog, although I never really thought of it in that way.  Apparently TMZ is a blog also...at least it’s listed in Technorati’s Top 100 Blogs.  I don’t read TMZ, but I’ve certainly heard of it without knowing that it is considered a blog.  (As you might have noticed, today I also learned how to make a word or phrase a link in my blog post.)

So, all in all, Thing 3 has been a productive learning experience that’s made me feel good about myself for learning something new, but not as good about myself as I felt last night when, after watching me do my   (semi-)daily Wii Fit, my six-year-old son told me, “You rock, Girl!”