Chapter 5. Searching the blogosphere
This chapter covers
- A brief introduction to the blogosphere
- A framework for searching the blogosphere
- Integrating Technorati and Bloglines
- Integrating MSN and Blogdigger using RSS
In early 2007, Microsoft was slated to launch its much-awaited new operating system—Vista. Perhaps tacitly acknowledging the growing power of the blogosphere—the collection of blogs on the web—and the impact it has in shaping the thoughts of others, a Microsoft employee contacted about 90 influential bloggers in late December 2006, offering them each a laptop, probably worth about $2,000, preloaded with Vista, and encouraging them to blog about their experiences with the new operating system. Leaving aside issues related to ethics and conflict of interest, public relations firms are now reaching out to bloggers, podcasters, and people who post video clips on the Internet to promote their products.
What people say about your product or application has an impact on others and affects your brand—it’s important to track what others are saying about your product or application. In this chapter, we look at how we can search the blogosphere to discover nuggets of relevant information. The infrastructure developed here to retrieve blog entries is leveraged in the remaining part of the book to build examples to illustrate various algorithms.