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October 05, 2007
RSS > You > Me
While my last blog entry was an interesting (edit: completely wrong) read, I slipped up on completing our RSS Basic exercise. In an effort to correct this, here is some more information about my experiences with RSS. Specifically, this is an account of some of the other searchable feed databases that I have used to add to my Bloglines account.
For the purpose of comparison, I chose to search “Detroit Red Wings” within each of these databases.
Blogdigger
My first search was sorted by date and found a lot of information form a lot of different sources. For whatever reason, I used to not be comfortable reading from people’s blogs. After being introduced to Bloglines, RSS, etc, I’ve become more comfortable in this regard. Some of the sources found in this search I never would have clicked on in the past. When I did, I found a good array of information from different points of view (a New Jersey fan talking about how well Brian Rafalski has fit in with the Wings for example). To my surprise, searching by relevance didn’t give me many relevant feeds or information. The first results were feeds that didn’t even work while the others were just news articles that mentioned the Red Wings.
Google Blog Search
My first search gave me the best source on the Red Wings that I have found so far (Red Wings Snapshots on MLive). I now check this site everyday through my blogines account and it has proved not only a good resource for my term project but also for keeping up to date with the team. I also found a good source from another personal blog called “The Red Wings Corner.” While this is more subjective (opinions on new jerseys, etc) it is an entertaining read. Google Blog Search searches by relevance first and then allows you to further sort by date. Somehow their relevance search works a lot better than Blogdiggers.
Rojo “The best free RSS and Atom feed reader”
The so-called “best free RSS reader” did not perform well enough for me to vote it the best. In fact, my first simple search just returned the same blog/article about a 1950’s Red Wing/Devil players funeral from multiple different sources. Not a very good result for my first search. When I made a more specific search (just for feeds) it actually returned zero results! It turns out that you have to register in order to use Rojo. When I did so, it returned some of the same results as Google Blog Search, but definitely nothing to differentiate it enough to call it “the best.” With the added inconvenience of signing up, I would probably just choose Google Blog Search every time.
For me, Google Blog Search seemed to be the most intuitive and helpful searchable feed database. I will continue to use it (along with adding it to my Google Desktop) in the future.
Posted by stevenwr at October 5, 2007 03:42 PM