Blogs as conversations and how blog search can help fill in the gaps

Robert Scoble, and others, are discussing blog search engines at present. It’s quite interesting to see that there are lots of different approaches to the same problem. Mary Hodder’s article is good in that it explains a bit about the differences in how Bloglines and Technorati get their figures. I guess it’s early days in the blog search engine space but none of the existing offerings really do what I’d like ;)

You see, I think that these search engines could help to reinforce the threads of conversation that permeate the world of blogs…

For me, the best thing about blogs is the comments and the linking between blogs that agree with the point being made and those that disagree. Being able to see that, although the original poster may think that X is the best way to do something, others have commented that they prefer Y or Y and Z, or A and B, etc is great and makes the information much more valuable. These links are often in the form of comments on the article in question or as trackbacks or referrer logs that some sites display. It’s these third-party comments that turn stand alone postings into valuable pieces of information. Without them blogs can just become marketing mouth pieces that spout unconfirmed and unquestioned information.

Unfortunately with the arrival of comment and trackback spam some bloggers have been forced to remove the ability to comment or ping postings because the spammers are using these facilities to boost the search rankings of their spam sites. Other bloggers prefer not to enable comments for whatever reason (scared of having their thinking challenged?) and sometimes the infrastructure fails and comments and trackbacks just fail to show up on the blog in question. I think a blog search service has the potential to revolutionise “the conversation” of blogging by allowing a browser to show both the original article and all of the other blogs that link to or reference that article. Think of it as an externalised trackback system.

To some extent Bloglines does this already if you’re using it as an aggregator; it will display an ‘x referrers’ link at the bottom of postings when it knows about trackbacks from other blogs that it tracks. What I’d like is the Google level implementation of this; either from an RSS reader or from a toolbar that will alert me to links as I browse. So, I suppose, the killer app for me is something that does a Google level “trackback” search of the whole web whenever I browse a blog article. I don’t want to have to go and do that manually in a “search engine” I want the results woven into my display of the original item. Oh, and, of course, it needs to strip out the spam…