This whole Zvents launch has made me realize that blog search has a loooong way to go. For the first time, I was really trying to find everything (OK, everything important) in the blogosphere about a particular topic. I started with Technorati. I used Feedster. I tried pubsub, IceRocket, and Bloglines. The overall experience was frustrating and only moderately successful. People told me that they'd blogged about me, and I couldn't find their posts. Caterina Fake from Flickr runs or has run four different blogs, it turns out - Flickr, MyWeb 2.0, Bizwerk, and Caterina.net. I only knew about three of them, and couldn't find her post. Finally I did - by searching for her name on Yahoo. (Thanks, Caterina and Y!, for the post *and* the search!) Despite the fact that Bizwerk is a blogspot blog, it mysteriously does not appear to be indexed on Technorati - or at least Caterina's post on our Zvents calendar widget doesn't turn up.
This is a mess, guys. I know we're letting a thousand flowers bloom here, but some serious gardening is needed!
Cool new discovery - tracking how many people have bookmarked Zvents (and what terms they use) on del.icio.us is a really interesting buzz meter. If delicious tracked bookmarking activity over time, they'd have an even MORE interesting relevance engine than the one they're already building. As usual on del.icio.us, this is an awesome function that's completely opaque to mere mortals -- as far as I can tell, the only way to generate an explicit box and button for "show me tags for this URL" is to have already successfully done it once. (follow the link and look at the bottom for the magic box). And now that I look at it more, the magic box doesn't seem to do that. What, pray tell, does "Check URL mean?"
Maybe we're only to web 1.9.
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