Finding Conversations in the Blogosphere

Blog Search = Opportunity by Rick Segal from his blog A VC, writes about the chatter over traditional search vs. blog tracking/search engines.

Rick, We are going to have a “long tail” of conversations that, over time, is going to be stocked full of valuable data. The tools/services that the blog search engines are trying out represent attempts to get real value out of all the conversations, not just the tier one or immediate entries.

Finding and Discovering Conversations in the Blogosphere.

Right now we're in the process of refining how we filter these conversations from 3rd party services such as: del.icio.us, technorati, icerocket, bloglines, flickr, blogpulse and others. Our current approach in Ideascape is a pick (AJAX) list of tags to pull in related ideas, conversations. No doubt, we are in the same boat as the blog tracking engines since our information is pulled and aggregated from them. Without getting too technical, we're also trying out the filtering of tagged rss feeds similar to what I mentioned above.

Let blogging become part of an employees job.

Of course, if all of your employees were blogging, engaging the blogosphere, it would be easier to stay on top of these conversations of interest

BTW Most of the blog tracking engines Rick mentions can be found on the bottom right column of this site.