The Wall Street Journal Online reports and compares several popular blog search engines, including Technorati, Feedster, IceRocket BlogPulse, DayPop and Bloglines in an article titled New Search Engine Help Users Find Blogs.

This article serves as an introduction on the benefits of each blog search engine, what sets it apart from the other. It gives examples on how using blog specific search engine can be more efficient than generic search engine like Google.

Some of these services have been around for only less than a year so we can expect to see more exciting things happening. When the demand for searching blogs increases, giant search engines may also tap into this market.

Source: The Wall Street Journal Online.
Via: Business Blog Consulting.

Technorati has started to categorize blogs by topics and authority with the release of Technorati Blog Finder. Before this release, we can only find blog posts about anything but not the entire blog.

Blog Finder takes the power of folksonomy. The problem is, you have to speak and think in the same term as the system to be categorized properly. The initial version of the listings was built based upon category and tag data that blogs had already submitted.

The challenge is how Technorati can automatically ranks blogs by subjects and still get the most relevant results users want. Technorati may not be as complex as Google, but nevertheless I think a lot of factors can be improved through human intervention.

By default, the blogs are presented in order of authority, which means highly-linked blogs appear first. So each of these Blog Finder pages is like a mini Top 100 for any topic you can imagine. You can also sort each tag by how recently the blogs have updated, or alphabetical by title.

And for all you bloggers out there, this is a great opportunity for your blog to get found. If you’re already a Technorati member with a claimed blog, all you have to do is visit your Configure Blog page to choose which tags you want to use. You can add up to 20 tags per blog.

Josh Hallett gives initial review of Technorati’s Blog Finder and the problems he encountered.

Hurricane Katrina is everywhere on the media, including blog recently. This is not an attempt to create another blog about the disaster. I just want to share with you my thoughts concerning the shocking catastrophe.

I don’t watch TV or listen to the radio, but I follow news online. Hint, Google Alert. I just can’t believe it and my eyes were flooded in tears as I saw almost entire city of New Orleans under water.

My heart goes out to these people.

The other day, I read a blog about a business owner trying to take advantage of this catastrophe to increase her visibility. She wanted to issue a press release, on which she announced donation for every sales she made during a certain period of time, or whatever marketing twist that is.

She even asked bloggers to blog about it so she can get more exposure. Well.. I sincerely hope that she did forward the money to the charity without deducting too much reasonable cost.

Today again I received emails from fellow marketers who asked for help and donation. I tell you what, they require me to fill in an opt-in box to get further information.

I don’t feel this is right.

I think marketers should not exploit the situation. Some will argue otherwise, but I certainly have seen clever marketing efforts that really bring good things to the cause.

Here are just three quick ideas to contribute and spread the news:

• Hold a free teleseminar and ask for contribution - Give away high quality product/ teleseminar that you usually charge and let them voluntarily donate what they think the value of the product directly to the charity.
• Leverage collective efforts to spread the news - Two is better than one, a group of people can create instant buzz and get people’s attention.
• Educate people - how to help practically, list resources that help. Even simple tasks can help, such as adding marker to Katrina Information Map to let people know about the location.
• Just do it - and others will follow.

American Red Cross has setup a page where people can contribute advertising space on their web site.

Knock Knock is the title of the new e-book by Seth Godin. It’s a guide to building a web site that works, and licensed under a Creative Common License.

On the second page of the PDF file, there’s a link that makes it easy to contribute to Red Cross.

A sequel to it will be available this weekend. Downloaded for my reading pleasure this weekend.

Download Knock Knock. For download mirrors, visit Seth Godin’s blog.

Despite many articles and posts written on RSS, e-mail and blog, there are still confusion among small business owners about when to implement which. In fact, they can overlap one another.

Just so that we are clear, RSS and e-mail are two different content delivery channel. The former uses pull technology and the latter utilizes push technology. Sound confusing? Let me elaborate.

RSS feed is like another web page. It is delivered via the same protocol as traditonal web page, only the format is different. You can’t push any web page to visitors. One might argue that a webmaster push all kinds of pop-up but that’s not the point. A visitor has to open a web site before the webmaster can push additional pages through pop-up.

So, consumer has to pull RSS feed using their RSS aggregator to read updated content. Contrary to this, e-mail allows sender to target a recipient by pushing the content. Subscribers give permission to the marketer so that he/ she can proceed to push content at a specified/ unspecified time.

Blog is just another web site, structured in a way that ease content publishing. Publishers often use blog to publish content, which in turn has built-in support for RSS feed generation. This RSS feed is what the subscribers grab by using RSS aggregator/ reader. Blog can be viewed just like a traditional web site.

The blog content, RSS feed content and newsletter are all content, while the web, RSS, and e-mail are all content delivery channels.

E-zine used to contain comprehensive coverage of certain topic. Spam filter issues might prevent marketers from sending long email piece nowadays.

Blog used to contain short and focused thoughts but now as the medium grows, publishers can publish anything from links to rants and full novel or book.

These media may overlap and carry the same content. There’s nothing wrong with it. Content publishers should leverage their content to reach as many targeted readers as possible.

Information junkies read blogs and subscribe to RSS to get up-to-date information, articles or any content.

Other group of people prefer e-zine to blog, or simply haven’t been aware about the technology yet. The content might overlap, but there is no reason not to publish to both channels to reach different target audience. Some of the audience may overlap too, but most of them don’t, at least for now.