The Three C's of Blogging

The Three C's of Blogging
What the blogosphere is doing to help in the aftermath of Katrina.

IT IS TEMPTING to speculate about how the new Supreme Court will differ from the old (Senator McConnell might want to find another complaint to file against McCain-Feingold), but that debate will rage for months into the future, and the blogosphere has had a very interesting two weeks responding to Katrina and its aftermath.
This has been the period when the blogs showed their three Cs: Compassion, connection, and correction.

First, compassion. Led by Glenn Reynolds and N.Z. Bear and beginning on September 1, a nonpartisan scrum of more than 1,800 bloggers appealed to their readers to support a long list of charities. More than $1,300,000 had been raised in a week, and that total only represents those blog readers willing not only to contribute but also to record their contribution in the N.Z. Bear log-in site.

Second, connection: N.Z. Bear, again, is pioneering an effort to post and match the needs and abilities of the hurting inside the recovery zone and those desiring to help across the country. With unlimited space, the internet allows for specificity in requested relief and response. The new portal being designed by N.Z. will list the needs of organizations in the recovery region and then allow the massive open source dynamic of the web to take over. By this time next week, institutions with specific wants will be able to post their lists on the N.Z. Bear portal, and bloggers will work to publicize the messages. Expect enormous efficiencies in the delivery of targeted relief as a result.

Finally, correction, as in the sort that follows from accountability.
There aren't going to be any secrets in this story, at least not for long. When Fox News's Major Garrett broke a story on Wednesday afternoon that Red Cross senior officials were confirming that Louisiana state officials had blocked the supply of water, food, blankets, and hygiene products to the Superdome, it was only moments later that the story had been picked up on FreeRepublic, and Garrett was booked and interviewed on my radio show.
In the same fashion, when New Orleans Mayor Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation earlier in the week, only to be overruled by Governor Blanco the same day, the public had instant knowledge of yet another snafu between the local and state governments. Despite the near monolithic chant of the mainstream media that the disaster in New Orleans was Bush's fault, a CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll revealed that outside of Andrew Sullivan and Daily Kos, the vast majority of Americans aren't buying the latest fever fresh from the swamp. It is no longer a question of running an end-run around media elites--it is a question of whether media elites have any purpose other than to amuse savvy news consumers. There's nothing like a tape of David Gregory at the White House press briefing to keep a drive time audience glued to the station's signal.

It is a new media world, and every story--even the biggest of disasters--proves it again and again.

-------------------------------------------
Hugh Hewitt is the host of a nationally syndicated radio show, and author most recently of Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That is Changing Your World. His daily blog can be found at HughHewitt.com.

Great article on 'finding BLOGs'; New Search Engines Help Users Find Blogs

Users Say Google and Yahoo Fail to Locate Latest Postings; A Guide to the Top Sites

The race is on to become the Google of blogs.

Web logs, online diaries written and published by everyone from college students to big media companies, are being created and updated at an astonishing rate -- and established search companies such as Google Inc. and Yahoo Inc. don't always catch them fast enough. Now, a handful of closely held upstarts such as Technorati Inc., Feedster Inc. and IceRocket.com LLC see an opportunity: Build a search engine that can track the information zipping through blogs, nearly in real time.

Search engine Technorati tracks about 16.5 million blogs.

The new sites are gaining traction with users looking to sample what people are talking about online, from the fallout from Hurricane Katrina to silly celebrity gossip. As free tools make it easier for even the most technophobic to publish online, there's a growing demand for services to sift through the clutter.

The new services, some of which are less than a year old, aren't without their glitches. The technology is still evolving and companies are still looking for the best way to track and sort blogs. Some services miss large numbers of blogs, while others pull up irrelevant sites.

Still, the tech-savvy are flocking to them. Julie Meloni, a 31-year-old Web designer in San Jose, Calif., often uses Google to find how-to guides for design tricks. But to learn what other Web designers are saying about a new development in the industry, she turns to Technorati to search blogs. "You can hear what the unofficial word is," she says. "You can watch the buzz happen."

Just a few years ago, the term "blog" didn't exist. Now, many people follow their postings as they would a favorite television show. Others turn to them for news. No one knows exactly how many blogs exist. But the number of them tracked by Technorati has doubled every five months or so to, most recently, about 16.5 million. The rapid proliferation has made it increasingly frustrating for Web users to find what they're looking for.

For those who want just a small taste of what prominent bloggers are saying, DayPop2 is a good place to go. It culls its search results from fewer than 60,000 blogs chosen by editors. That means it's likely to offer up relatively few links to well-known bloggers like Andrew Sullivan and Dan Gillmor. Sites like Technorati3, Feedster4, IceRocket5 and BlogPulse6 scour far more blogs -- between 15 million and 20 million each -- so searches on those sites deliver far more results, often from obscure sources. While Technorati and BlogPulse focus exclusively on blogs, other sites -- Feedster and IceRocket included -- offer the option to bring in mainstream news sources.

Search results often vary widely between sites. A blog search yesterday afternoon for "William Rehnquist" and "John Roberts" returned more than 2,000 results on Feedster, with 85 posted that day. BlogPulse, meanwhile, offered 704 results, with just five from that day -- three from the same Web site. Technorati and IceRocket fell somewhere in between with 845 and 1,295 results, respectively, about 50 each posted that day. Of all the recently posted blog entries -- from sources ranging from confused college students to well-regarded political pundits -- few showed up on the first page of results for more than one search site.

The big general search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN do include blog pages in Web and news searches, but so far don't allow users to conduct blog-only searches. For news searches, the sites update their listings of articles several times an hour. But for Web searches, they build their indexes by sending automated Web crawlers scurrying through the Internet, taking snapshots of all the Web pages they visit. They then sort their results based heavily on relevance, using complex (and guarded) formulas that display results based, in part, on how popular a particular site is. The process means that the big sites don't always deliver the freshest Web search results. The day after MTV's annual Video Music Awards show, the first result in a Google search for "video music awards" was the official MTV Web site. The second result was a blog entry about gadgets toted by celebrities at last year's show. The third: A review of the awards show -- written three years ago. The blog search sites, meanwhile, offered links to chatty -- and timely -- gossip about stars' outfits and rambling acceptance speeches this year.

While Google, Yahoo and Microsoft search billions of Web pages, blog search sites typically focus on between 10 million and 20 million blogs. But, in many ways, the upstarts are as different from each other as they are from the giants. Technorati, for instance, relies mostly on a mechanism called "pinging" to monitor blogs. Most bloggers maintain their journals through blog publishing services like Blogger or LiveJournal, which have features that can automatically send out a "ping" to notify search services when a user's blog has been updated. David Sifry, chief executive of Technorati, says his company gets an edge from exclusive deals in which some blog-hosting companies ping Technorati before anyone else. After receiving a heads-up, Technorati visits the blog and updates its database.

Feedster monitors pings, too, but also sleuths for new entries on its own by automatically combing through news feeds, which are summaries of blog entries that can include just a few paragraphs. But the use of news feeds means that Feedster might miss a blog entry that mentions, say, Hurricane Katrina in the last paragraph. IceRocket relies a little less on pings, and more on automated Web crawlers, which surf from site to site looking for new entries. The crawlers can distinguish blogs from other Web pages because most blogs look the same, with chronologically arranged entries, separate headings for each one, and so on.

The new blog-search sites draw only a sliver of the visitors that Google, Yahoo and Microsoft's MSN do. Most of them didn't have enough traffic in July to register on the radar of Internet-tracking firm Nielsen/NetRatings. Technorati did, with 642,000 unique visitors. But its traffic still made up less than 1% of Google's visitors that month.

Fellow Freepers:

At the suggestion of writer Michelle Malkin last Friday, I have cobbled together a blogsite called Texas Clearinghouse for Katrina Aid to serve as a clearinghouse for refugee efforts in Texas.

Texas is getting more refugees than any other state -- that's fine, we'll take them all -- but we need help providing them with food, clothing, medicine, and shelter. We need help taking care of their pets, too.

If you are a refugee, you can information that will help you find relief. If you want to donate or volunteer, you can find someone who needs you. Believe me, there are a lot of organizations who need your help.

Right now the site mostly covers Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas but I'm adding more every night. My wife was down at Reunion Arena in Dallas Tuesday handing out care packages and spiritually ministering to the refugees as a representative of her employer. She says that the situation is tragic and that there's a lot of work to be done. There are so many children who don't know where their parents are or even if their parents are still alive.

There are a lot of churches and other organizations in Texas that need help in dealing with the problem and I would appreciate it if you would get the word out.

Many thanks,

Michael McCullough

Stingray blogsite

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.