Thing Number 9: Finding Feeds

Well for Thing Nine it was to look at search tools for finding feeds, and I did visit Technorati, Syndic8, Topix, as well as the ever useful Google where I clicked on "More" and to my surprise found blogs there-thanks WebThings! I wouldn't normally have looked there. I also watched the Technorati Tutorial, during which I exclaimed aloud (luckily not too loudly as I was at the Circulation desk, lol): "This is supposed to be helpful?" :) So here are a few of my thoughts on these things.

Technorati Tutorial: aptly named, good for Techies already familiar with it. Watching it I figured I could learn more just fooling around the site myself. My own opinion, of course :)

Technorati.com: Eh. It's okay, but the results definitely skew to the news, even if you put in something like cats in the search box. Seeing as the only news I really want to see is in a store's sales circular, it doesn't really work for me ;)

syndic8: Which I just realized would stand for Syndicate-hahaha-is interesting I guess, but I'd have to spend a bit more time to really look at it. Put something like cats in the "search for feed" box, and you definitely get some cat blogs. Plus it gives you extra information like when it was created, what its status is, and a bunch of other information I'd need some more time to look into (when not being interrupted by pesky customers, lol-just kidding!).

Topix: Which says "Your town. Your news. Your take." I suppose to say it means that it can do more local information. It's just that most news that news sources want to bombard you with is too depressing for me. Basically, it's kinda like news on a Yahoo homepage, and on that I can customize it to show the less depressing and more interesting to me news (like what computers are hot, for example). Its search also skews to the more depressing news, so I'll be giving Topix a pass.

Now the two sources after all that that I would probably use to find feeds if I was looking: the ever-useful Google, and Bloglines search. Also: you can do a search for, say, "blogfinder" on Ask.com, and it comes up with a bunch of links to blog finders :) Ditto for "find feeds". I'm very comfortable with the search engines I already use, so inertia being what it is, I'll probably stick with them. But this was an interesting exercise anyway :)