In the Information Age, Librarians Will Rule

"In the information age, librarians will rule, because only they will be able to find things in the dataflood in a timely fashion. Teresa Nielsen Hayden has a post on how to welcome our wearing-their-glasses-on-chains-around-their-necks sweater-wearing overlords-to-be...." [Brad DeLong's Website]

Wow, I love the blogosphere (the capital "B" one and all the little ones)! First Scott Johnson creates Roogle, an RSS search engine (sorry, James), and then Micah Alpern just happens to have written an answer to my request for a search engine for my aggregator.

Searching the Blogosphere

"Until the semantic web arrives the best method we have to understand a users point of view is to examine the RSS feeds they subscribe to. I currently read RSS feeds from over 70 websites. This list of RSS feeds includes friends, publications, and domain expects; all people whose opinions I value.  If Googling my weblog is like searching by backup brain, then searching all sites in my RSS news aggregator is like searching the brains of people I respect and find interesting.

Some times I want to know what the world thinks                         (google)

Some times I want to know what I think                                        (my weblog)

Some times I want to know what those I respect think                  (blogs I read)....

I’m using the Google Soap API and PHP to do a series of domain specific searches with the site:foo.com advanced operator. Where do I get the list of news feeds to search?  Radio Userland, the RSS news aggregator I use produces an OPML file, which is an XML document that lists all my news sources.  All the results are collected together and presented on a single page....

As the quote by Alex Halavais at the top of this article notes, there are multiple blogsphere’s.  These intersecting spheres are broken down by, among other things, interests, associations, geography, and responsibilities. We each live in several sphere’s simultaneously. Identifying and exploiting these sphere will require technical infrastructure in identify and reputation that are still being developed.  As always the failure of geeks to find what they’re looking for will drive this development."

Basically, Micah has created an engine that searches the web (Google), your blog, or the blogs you read in your aggregator. It can even be incorporated into your web site! Wow. Majorly suh-weet with book-ending happy dances! Of course, you're still relying on Google's indexing of the blogs in your aggregator, but talk about a giant leap for blogkind. Thanks, Micah!

Isobel also suggests trying Agent Frank, which looks quite intriguing. I need more hours in the day!

FM RadioStation

"FM RadioStation (FMRS) is a desktop application that enhances the Radio experience by integrating 3 applications: news aggregator, blog publishing tool, and web browser into a single, easy-to-use, unified experience."

Sounds interesting. I especially like how much easier it is to add an image to a post (an area sorely dismissed by current blogging tools). I'll try to give it a whirl this weekend but if I can't access it remotely, it won't do me any good.

I'm starting to focus on next week's Computers in Libraries conference, for which Pat Delaney suggests a libra-blogger get-together. I think it's a great idea, so if you're interested let one of us know. Steven, I've already RSVP-ed for you. Right now it looks like Thursday night dinner is our best bet. Do they have spicy noodles in DC?  :-)