« A Dark Week For Lotusphere | Main| IBM WorkPlace Managed Client »

Google BlogSearch and BlogSphere

Tags : None
Bookmark : del.icio.us  Technorati  Digg This  Add To Furl  Add To YahooMyWeb  Add To Reddit  Add To NewsVine 

Google has today revealed a new search service aimed directly at blogs. It uses a blogs RSS or ATOM feed to gather details from entries for indexing. To get into the blog index you just need to ping the WebLogs interface every time you publish a new story.

From the 'About Google BlogSearch' page :

If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it.

If your using Blogsphere for your blog then there is a built in feature that will ping the Weblogs.com list for you.  In the main blog configuration on the Story Setup page you should see the option for the Weblogs Ping. Set this to 'Always' or 'Ask' and then when you create a new blog entry Blogsphere will automatically inform the Weblogs.com list that your site has been updated.

Comments

Gravatar Image1 - Hi Declan,

I've been playing with Blogsphere for a few months and finally have LotusGuru.com up and running on the platform. I've made several tweeks to the code which I plan to share with you for the next release, but had a couple questions about this weblogs.com issue first.

1 - Will the ping work if I publish stories from a local replica in the Notes client, or do I need to be on the server?

2 - Do I need to "re-ping" for stories already published, or will a single ping cause all published stories to get indexed?

Thanks, and great job making Blogsphere a reality!

Kevin

Gravatar Image2 - I hope it will soon be possible to ping Google Blogsearch directly and not have to rely on weblogs.com which is often so heavily loaded that attempts to ping just time out.

Incidentally, I attempted a Blogsphere hack to enable an XML-RPC ping to Technorati in the same way as weblogs.com but couldn't get it to work

However, I did find a nice service called Pingomatic (http://pingomatic.com) which will send pings to a number of services simultaneously including weblogs.com, Technorati and another I use regularly, Feedburner.

You can set up a single bookmark there which will ping all of your chosen services.

The bad news - as of right now Pingomatic is broken though I expect they will have it sorted out before very long - looks like their server just needs a little kick.