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entire Web. But the downside is that you're missing things like personal
commentary and information and commentary on topics that have not
attracted the notice of the media. For these types of searches, you need to
be monitoring blogs.
Searching Blogs
Blogs don't have the credibility of established media, but as a resource
for commentary, discussion, unusual perspectives on current events, and
coverage of topics that might not have hit the radar of the media, they are
invaluable. True, you will have to turn your—ahem—bullpuckey detector
way up. On the other hand, you'll ind resources and perspectives that you
won't ind in major media in a month of Sundays.
Feedster
We looked at Feedster (feedster.com) earlier in the topic. It's great for ind-
ing RSS feeds, and blog commentary as well!
Building your queries
Feedster indexes only RSS feeds, which means that its advanced search
should be hideously complicated and let you do all kinds of strange and
very detailed searching. But it doesn't. It's a very basic keyword search with
the option to ind links, entries from a particular feed, etc.
hat's not to say that there isn't a couple of special syntax available. You can
search for words in a title using a title syntax like this:
title:keyword
. You
can search for one word or another using
or
. Remember that you're search-
ing blog commentary, so you might want to use more casual language or
even try introducing a few misspellings into your queries if your search
would seem to warrant it. For example, if you're doing searches for layman
commentary on medical issues, you might use less formal terms.
hints
n
don't be afraid to do a lot of different queries. searching
commentary isn't like searching news stories.
n
Try using slang and other informal language when doing
your search.
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