Following my last column on searching blogs, here are some reader suggestions and comments:
Lisa Williams, the editor of the citizen journalism site H2otown.info, says, “MonitorThis and Gada.Be will allow you to search many of these services simultaneously. Even better, they output an OPML file of search feeds for the term you entered for each service. Add that OPML file to your RSS reader, and whenever you open your newsreader, you’ll see all the new hits on those services for that search term.”
Here’s more on how to use RSS.
Richard Silverstein wrote in to suggest Blogdigger. “It’s a cool service that combines blog search, audio/video search, blogs grouped by subject, etc. Here’s a post I wrote about Blogdigger.”
You can read more about Blogdigger and two other local blog search tools in a column I wrote earlier this year.
Scott Johnson, one of the founders of Feedster, writes in to point out that while Feedster is “not as glitzy as Technorati on user interface,” the site has “made a Google-like decision to focus on substance versus style. We’ve also put our recent focus into battling spam much more aggressively than the other engines.”
Feedster, it’s worth noting, also has several other useful features and speciality feeds, such as politics.feedster.com for tracking political blogs. Journalists, in particular, ought to find the Ego Feed builder useful — it makes it easy to find out who’s talking about you and stories you’ve written.
WHAT SITES DO YOU RECOMMEND?
Please send them to poynter (at) jondube.com and I may run your suggestions.
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