SOMEWHAT FRANK

IceRocket Resurfaces with Blogger Stats

IceRocket, a blog search engine that gets mentioned less and less in the blog search discussions, has begun to offer a new blog metrics feature which might attract bloggers back. Similar to BlogBeat, which was acquired by FeedBurner, IceRocket is offering blog metrics.

Offering bloggers metrics might help IceRocket to reverse the downward decline in traffic over the past year (shown below). I recall almost two years ago IceRocket was a rising star along side Technorati in a very open blog search race. Technorati has continued to grow and companies like Sphere have been created and stolen some of the spotlight. I remember getting lots of referals from people finding my content via IceRocket blog search and have mentioned IceRocket a number of times on Somewhat Frank. What happened to IceRocket?

It will be interesting to see if IceRocket can use the metrics feature to delieve blogosphere reporting on the state of the IceRocket tracked blogosphere. Or is too late to stop IceRocket's downward traffic spiral?

Sphere Blog Search: Needs To Train Dogs

Sphere, a blog search engine, finally launched today (May 2, 2006) after much anticipation with a new look and logo since first hearing about Sphere in October 2005. My first impressions was that it presents a very simple interface with a clean layout. The site was designed with the help of Adaptive Path and Ryan Freitas had this to say on designing the search site:

"The question for the Adaptive Path team was how to iterate the search experience without alienating users. More importantly, we wanted to do so without messing up the elegance of the search box."

The search features were a little different than what I am used to but they were manageable once I took a quick look at the search tips. One interesting thing I noted was that Sphere keeps tabs on a few blog metrics like average posts per week, average words per post and number of posts this week under a blog profile page. Also Sphere provides a media search which pulls together a news, photo and book search all in one page. The photos appear to be pulled in from Webshots.

There were a number perspectives given in the following Sphere reviews:

• TechCrunch
• The Search Engine Marketing Blog
• Search Engine Watch
• Venture Voice
• Elliott Back

Overall, I liked Sphere and think it has a chance to compete with Technorati, Google Blog Search and IceRocket.com for the blog search engine crown but its biggest obstacle is going to be to teaching old Technorati trained dogs new tricks. Sphere has a solid braintrust with past successes which include WordPress and OddPost so I think they might just be able to make this blog search engine race interesting.

IceRocket Blog Search Engine Acquired

According to a recent press release Think Partnership, a Northbrook, Illinois based company that offers a number of online search and marketing services, has entered into a letter of intent to acquire the blog search engine IceRocket. IceRocket is a real-time blog search engine funded by Mark Cuban which I have mentioned a number of times previously on Somewhat Frank. A price tag on the deal has not surfaced.

Blake Rhodes, CEO of IceRocket, had this to say about the deal:

"I am thrilled that IceRocket is uniting with Think Partnership, enabling us to connect the huge and growing blogging community to the business opportunities and network provided by Think Partnership, especially Litmus Media's Valid Click network and PrimaryAds' affiliate marketing network."

I am not familiar with all the business and services Think Partnership currently provides so I am curious to find out what it intends to do with IceRocket. According to Scott Mitchell, CEO of Think Partnership, Inc.:

"IceRocket will provide Think Partnership with an innovative platform to help our advertisers leverage the rapidly increasing traffic generated by the popularity of blogs."

I think IceRocket has a lot to offer the blogosphere so hopefully Think Partnership will continue to develop and improve IceRocket with additional features and services.

For additional perspectives on the deal check out ValleyWag and WebProNews.com.

Technology Evangelist 'The Innovators' Series Visits Somewhat Frank

The Technology Evangelist team continued to hunt innovators as they swung into Chicago about a month ago to meet-up with for Episode 2 of online video series called The Innovators. You may recall Episode 1 which I highlighted recently which included the interview with Derek Franklin.

Episode 2 features me chatting with Ro Marth and Ed Kohler in a popular Chicago restaurant and bar just off of Michigan Avenue. We discussed blogging and I gave some tips for anyone that may be thinking about diving into the blogosphere by starting up a blog. In the video I mention a slide presentation on setting up a blog which is a 13 slide presentations below.

Steps to Getting Started In the Blogosphere - Part 1: Settng up a blog   PDF file

It was a pleasure meeting with the Technology Evangelist team.  I hope you enjoy the show.

Somewhat Frank del.icio.us Bookmarks (11.16.05)

del.icio.us bookmarks for 11-16-2005 by Somewhat Frank (a.k.a)  Frank Gruber

Sports Lounge LLC launches the Sports Cartel Blog Network : The Blog Herald

Sports themed blog network launched.

Google's Classified Play Launches : Online News Squared

Ironically, this post mentions how Google's founder was puzzled by the Newspaper online classified ads a few years back and now Google has launched GoogleBase, its own classified ads project, of sorts. Additionally, I posted about GoogleBase on Somewhat Frank back in September and then again in late October in the post titled Google Base To Take On Craigslist, eBay, and Newspapers.

Amazon to sell individual book pages : Phil Bradley's Blog

One page at time...via Amazon.

Microsoft to remove Sony BMG malware

Microsoft is removing DRM from Sony CD's after a bug was found which opened PC's up to hackers!

Porn industry gears up for mobile phones, iPods

Wireless air waves are preparing to blast porn to phones, iPods, and other devices.

TiVo Netflix RSS Reader : tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog

This download allows Netflix users to view their account via the TiVo on your TV by putting it in RSS format.

State of the Blogosphere, Follow up : The RSS Blog

According this post, Mark Cuban has listed some things IceRocket is doing to combat Splog.

37 Signals, 1 Clear Message

One clear message = keep it simple!

"Spend less money, hire fewer people, work fewer hours, and -- most surprising of all -- offer fewer features."

PAL vs. NTSC

Excellent overview of PAL and NTSC formats if you are into video editing and need to figure out the best option for your project needs.

As Blogs and Citizen Journalism Grow,  Where's the News? : Poynter Online

An interesting article on blogs and citizen journalism.

Washington Post Reports On Splog

The WashingtonPost.com published an article today about spam blogs or splogs. I found the article interesting especially this quote by Anne P. Mitchell, president and chief executive of the Institute for Spam and Internet Public Policy and a law professor at the Lincoln Law School of San Jose, explaining how Internet companies that helped create the blog phenomenon can also help keep it clean:

"From an ethical, moral, good Internet neighbor perspective . . . if they have the ability to do so, they should do so."

However, the article failed to dig deep enough to highlight the action of Splog Reporter recently highlighted by the Wall Street Journal and Wired News, among others.

If the raging splog battle is new to you, let me start by saying spam blogs or splogs are clogging up search engine search results much like spam emails have been clogging up your email inbox for years. Splog Reporter was created by me (Frank Gruber) and Jeff Johns in mid-August as the trash can for splog in the blogosphere. Basically, we have created a system for detecting splogs that are reported. We also offer the Splog Reporter as a service to help clean up our client’s data and detect splogs from regular blog URLs. For more information on splog, be sure to check out Splog Reporter and the definition of splog on Wikipedia.

For views from the blogosphere check out posts on TeleRead, By the Bayou and Turned Earth.

Splog Reporter Cited In WSJ Report

David Kesmodel wrote a very comprehensive article in the Wall Street Journal today in regard to the current splog problem in the blogosphere. It appeared in the print version on page B1 and on the WSJ online on the front right widget titled Blog Clog.

The article describes the splog problem and explains the roles of Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, IceRocket, Technorati, PubSub, Feedster, BlogBurner, and Splog Reporter.

David interviewed me a few weeks ago for the article which explains the Splog Reporter effort and brings to light the fact that Splog Reporter has anecdote for determining:

“...how "spammy" a blog is...”

So basically, Splog Reporter has the “special sauce” that can determine splogs from regular blogs.

UPDATE: Check out the blog of Troy Brumley for another perspective of the WSJ splog report.

Splog Causes IceRocket To Ban Blogspot

Splog, or spam blog, is at the forefront of the blogosphere again as indicated by the blog search engine IceRocket’s recent ban of Google Blogger accounts from its search index on Oct. 16. The issue has been mounting steadily, and Mark Cuban recently sounded off about Google’s free blog product, Blogger, on his blog post titled, “Get Your Blogspot Shit Together.”

I founded Splog Reporter a few months ago in an effort to help control the problem of splog clogging the blogosphere by taking the Web 2.0 approach of “empowering people” through providing “good willed” bloggers the opportunity to report URLs to Splog Reporter. Co-manager Jeff Johns and I developed a proprietary system behind Splog Reporter that determines splogs from regular blogs which marks them appropriately in our database.

It sounds like search engines are in need of help and the Splog Reporter system might be able to address this need.

For some other blogosphere perspectives check out RatcliffeBlog, BuzzMachine, Chris Pirillo, Tim Bray, The Modern Marketer, The J Spot, Strategize, and Bayosphere.

Pluck Shadows Community Search Beta No More

Pluck first introduced the community tagging and blog search engine called Shadows as a Beta in mid-July. It offers a simple way for bloggers to tag their posts rather then actually adding tag code to your posts. It also offers other collaborative capabilities which include joining web groups and discussions. Additionally, Shadows offers a blog tag search feature which can be sorted by users, groups, and listings you specifically tagged.

I first blogged about Shadows back in July in the Somewhat Frank post IceRocket and Pluck Shadows Tagging as it was offered as a Beta. Today Pluck announced Shadows 1.0 is no longer in the Beta phase in the latest Pluck Press Release.  Check out Shadows and give it a try. It has a lot to offer to bloggers and non-bloggers alike.

Sphere Offers A Better Blog Search?

I recently read about Sphere the soon to be released blog search in a post by Rob Hof of the BusinessWeek Tech Beat blog. I tried to get into the Beta group but was not able to at the present time but appear to be on the waiting list. I read more about Sphere on the Sphere About page and came away with these questions:

1.)    How does this new blog search going to work?
Is the search going to crawl the web or rely on pings from users? Sphere is supposed to work better then the current search engines and I am curious as to how this will be orchestrated to compete with IceRocket and Technorati and more recently Yahoo and Google. The about page talks of a relevancy based search as follows:

“Our new relevance-based algorithm discovers new blog posts as they're created, indexes them within minutes of being published, applies rich semantic analysis and makes them searchable by relevance or time.”

It will be interesting to see how that works.

2.) How will Sphere filter out spam?
It is mentioned in the About page but they do not go into detail. As co-manager of Splog Reporter, I am interested to see the efforts of other companies to combat spam blogs or splog.

3.) What other unique features does this new blog search have to offer? 
Obviously, the people behind Sphere know they have to compete with the big blog search engines and must have something unique to offer users. I cannot wait to see it in action.

Check out the blogosphere posts about Sphere on Web 2.0 Central, Jeremy Zawodny, Blogspotting, Changing Way, TechCrunch, and Tom Raftery's I.T. Views.

Has anyone else seen Sphere yet? If so, please comment on it. I would love to hear your feedback.

Yahoo Blog Search Soon To Launch

Yahoo has been testing a blog search engine since Steve Rubel uncovered it online in early July (2005). Stephen Baker has been keeping his ear to the rail and has reported on Blogspotting that the launch of Yahoo Blog Search is coming very soon. I wonder what type of strategy the search will employ. Google recently launched a blog search to criticism from the blogosphere for its ability to only index the briefs from RSS feeds and not entire posts. Due to the inability of Google blog search to index my content immediately, I still tend to use Technorati most religiously with IceRocket coming in as a close second. I wonder if Yahoo can make me change my blog searching ways?

The Wall Street Journal Blog Search Engine Race

The Wall Street Journal article New Search Engines Help Users Find Blogs is worth reading especially if you are new to blogging or the blogosphere. The article highlights the blogosphere and explains the search engines (i.e. Technorati, Feedster, & IceRocket) race to become number one in blog search. Though I thought the article's mention of DayPop could be helpful for the novice blog reader, it is probably not a site I would regularly visit since it does limit it's results to only certain popular blogs. The article also talks about Microsoft and how MSN Search is currently including blog search results however they have not offered a "blog only" search function to users. However, you probably notice the MSN site search on Somewhat Frank. The reason I am using MSN and not another blog search engine is because I found that MSN indexes Somewhat Frank the best out of all of the other search engines. I want users to be able to find all of my content and feel MSN Search offers them the best opportunity.

Ironically, this article is very similar to a previous post I wrote (July 10, 2005) titled Who Will Be #1 In Blog Search. I just re-read that post from July and realized I was ranting a bit about Technorati's technical issues which they seem to still have at times. Though Technorati released Blog Finder last week which was received with a few grumbles from the blogosphere since it was seen as nothing new but repackaging current functionality. Personally, I like the Blog Finder functionality. Since I did not use IceRocket at the point of writing that article I did not mention them. However, I have used IceRocket quite a bit since. I have implemented their Link Tracker functionality to determine how many blogs are linking to my individual posts in IceRocket. I also talked about Yahoo or Google possibly making their move.

The WSJ article basically says that the race is to become the "Google of blogs" and I have to agree I still wonder if Google will enter the race to be the "Google of blogs".

Spam + Blog = Splog : How Is It Affecting The Blogosphere?

I just read a post by Mark Cuban that explained it simply as spam in the form of a blog. What is splog?

Spam + Blog = Splog

Clever naming convention I know, but splog is creating an astrericks next to the validity of blogging numbers in the blogsphere as decreasing the quality of blog search engine search results.  Mark believes and I agree Google's blogger.com and other free blogging services it make it too easy start a bogus blog or splog. Though I find that offering free blogs is a wonderful thing for the good willed blogger it offers a free tool for nasty sploggers to unleash their garbage. These splogs are clogging the blogsphere and need to be handled in some way. IceRocket hinted at plans to stop indexing free blog offerings to help clean up their search results. I think this is a great idea but unfortunately will hurt the "good willed" blogger thus taking away some of the blogospheres freedom. This lose of freedom is the unfortunate part as these sploggers are really acting as blogosphere terrorists and need to be stopped.

Mark Cuban in closing offered this thought and I am going to take it as a call to arms:

"The intellectual property that is available in the blogosphere is an amazing source of ideas, facts and imagination. Now is the time to do something before the splog overwhelms it and make it difficult to discover new and exciting blogs."

I have a suggestion for Mark and IceRocket and any other blog search engine that will take it and run with it, I think you need a splogger patrol. Ad a link to your search results that allows the "good willed" bloggers of the blogosphere to report any blogs they find to be splogs in nature. Call it splog reporting or the splog patrol. I recently launched beta for a simple website called SplogReporter.com where "good willed" bloggers can report sploggers. Verification will then be made on which submitted items are truly splogs. So please bookmark the Splog Reporter site and report any splogs you come across. The goal is to create a master directory of splog URLs to have removed from the search engines. So "good willed" bloggers of the blogosphere, this is your call to arms to rid the blogosphere of splogs.

Does anyone have any other suggestions on what can be done to take action against splog without having to eliminate free blog offerings from blog search engine results?

Is Technorati Really For Sale?

Rumors have been swirling that Technorati is about to be sold to a large search engine company. I tried to trace these rumors to their source and all roads lead to BL Ochman. Her recent post titled Technorati About To Be Sold stated that a deal will occur within a week or so. She guesses Yahoo is the large search engine company doing the purchasing. However, I started to play the "what if" game and thought, what if Technorati is sold to the team of Mark Cuban and Blake Rhodes at IceRocket, or MSN decides to play hardball in the blog search arena or Google decides to flex its muscle for that matter? Would they create a blog search called Goognorati?

This could help us to find answers to the question: Who Will Be #1 In Blog Search?
What do you think is in store for Technorati?

UPDATE: I emailed Technorati Community Manager Naill Kennedy to try to get his insight on these rumors and he pointed me to a post on his personal blog here.

How Should Blogs Be Ranked?

It seems that a debate has been brewing in the blogging world on what criteria a blog should receive ranking on. Technorati might have set the bar by creating their ranking system with their algorithm which uses your links and sources to calculate a ranking number. Technorati's ranking system has also experienced many problems in keeping up with the growing blogging community. Jason Calacanis recently put a bounty on setting up a new ranking system which helped to fuel this debate. So obviously bloggers feel there is room to improve the blog ranking system. Blogspotting recently called on Mark Cuban with his ties to the blog search engine IceRocket to set the new bar.  Technoogle examines IceRocket's Link Tracker this post.  Link Tracker can be integrated into your site a couple of different ways and displays how many links are associated with each of your posts on your site.  Also TalkDigger counts links from a number of web and search engines as mentioned in this Somewhat Frank post.

The big question to ponder is, what is the correct criteria for ranking a blog? Should we solely use links and sources? Should we use some other algorithm? Should blogs be ranked on the amount or quality of content? Or is traffic to a blog important? Alexa gives traffic ranking on site URLs but does not distinguish between blogs and websites. So should blogs be competing with regular websites? Pluck released Shadows a blog search product which has users rank the blogs. Is this user generated feedback a solid approach for ranking? Does anyone have any ideas on how blogs should be ranked?