So, let’s compare blog search engines and see how they are doing.

Google Blog Search for Seagate (note, this is different than the “main” Google engine – also, you have to click “sorted by date” to get the latest stuff).

IceRocket for Seagate.
Sphere for Seagate.
Technorati for Seagate.
Ask for Seagate.

Sorry guys. Google is just trouncing you here. Not only did it have my article first, but it had Jon Fortt’s article on DAVE first too.

Google’s blog search also has less noise. My second favorite? It’s Ask. It had both my article and Gizmodo’s mention of it last night.

Technorati? Dave Sifry, what’s going on? Your engine is looking worse and worse as time goes along. I find that I’m using Technorati less and less as time goes along too. Nothing about DAVE is up on Technorati yet. In fact, I wonder if Technorati is even indexing my blog anymore?

Not a good performance at all for Technorati. If a big company (two, actually) are already beating a startup on speed and quality (they are) then the startup is toast.

Why are blog search engines important? Because it’s how everyone from political campaigns to corporate officers inside places like Seagate listen to what the bloggers are saying about them.

If a blog search engine isn’t up to the minute then the people who use that engine are at a disadvantage to people who are using another engine. It’s why I can link out to interesting stuff about Seagate before other bloggers wake up.

Oh, and it’s also a way I can keep track of who’s linking or not.

One thing I don’t like about Google’s blog search is that it defaults to “sort by relevance.” I far prefer the “Sorted by date” option (you have to click that on the top right side of the page to get it to show you the newest stuff it found).

How long does it take your blog about Seagate to get into the blog search engines?

UPDATE: It’s now 6:12 a.m. – more than two hours since announcement – and Technorati still doesn’t have a single mention of DAVE. It doesn’t even have Gizmodo’s mention of Seagate that was posted last night. If Technorati isn’t getting Gizmodo into its index, what hope does any other blogger have of getting into Technorati. Google actually has improved over the past two hours, while Technorati has gotten worse. And people wonder why I’m a Google fan

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Robert Scoble is the founder of the Scobleizer blog. He works as PodTech.net’s Vice President of Media Development.

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Beal got the news from newly-appointed Think CEO Scott Mitchell, who would not give details as to why the deal fell through. Think’s letter of intent to acquire the company was announced in mid-April of this year, as Think looked into ways to channel advertising into the blogosphere.

IceRocket CEO Blake Rhodes has apparently not given up though. Rhodes told Beal that while the LOI was “dead,” the two companies would still be working together. That message seems a little less assertive than a statement posted on Texas Startup Blog, however:

Some think the Rhodes shouldn’t hold his breath. Think has a history of potential buyer’s remorse. Letters of intent were issued and withdrawn from both Crystal Reference Systems and Proceed Interactive.

IceRocket and Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban was unavailable for comment due to his basketball team’s NBA Finals appearance and his need to blog the minutes while taunting all the naysaying sports writers.

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Terms of the deal have not yet been revealed.

My hat’s off to Gerry and Scott, the deal is by far the most impressive in the company’s history.

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Andy Beal is an internet marketing consultant and considered one of the world’s most respected and interactive search engine marketing experts. Andy has worked with many Fortune 1000 companies such as Motorola, CitiFinancial, Lowes, Alaska Air, DeWALT, NBC and Experian.

You can read his internet marketing blog at Marketing Pilgrim and reach him at andy.beal@gmail.com.

Think Partnership has announced a letter of intent to acquire IceRocket. Financial terms have not been disclosed.

“I am thrilled that IceRocket is uniting with Think Partnership, enabling us to connect the huge and growing blogging community to the business opportunities and network provided by Think Partnership, especially Litmus Media’s Valid Click network and PrimaryAds’ affiliate marketing network,” Rhodes said in a statement.

Rhodes will remain on as CEO after the deal closes. Various tasks, including due diligence and negotiations with Wachovia Bank over its loan agreement with Think, remain pending.

“Both of our companies are focused on providing the highest integrity services to our users and building core enabling technology that can eliminate click fraud and “splogging” on our networks in real time.” Cuban said in the announcement.

Think’s president, Scott Mitchell, likewise extolled the anti-splogging capabilities developed by IceRocket. Splogging, or spam blogging, refers to blogs created solely as holders of keywords and advertisements. They exist solely to collect advertising “clicks” and benefit the splog owner without providing any actual value to readers.

With Think’s technologies, IceRocket could become a revenue generator for blogs. Efforts by privately held BlogAds and Federated Media provide advertising for blog publishers; the Think services referenced by Rhodes could enable IceRocket to build a similar business.

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Cuban and IceRocket CEO Blake Rhodes co-own the blog search site, and have announced a letter of intent from Think Partnership (THK), a Northbrook, IL-based technology solutions provider, to acquire IceRocket. Financial terms were not disclosed.

“I am thrilled that IceRocket is uniting with Think Partnership, enabling us to connect the huge and growing blogging community to the business opportunities and network provided by Think Partnership, especially Litmus Media’s Valid Click network and PrimaryAds’ affiliate marketing network,” Rhodes said in a statement.

Also, Rhodes will remain on as CEO after the deal closes. Various tasks, including due diligence and negotiations with Wachovia Bank (WB) over its loan agreement with Think, remain pending.

“Both of our companies are focused on providing the highest integrity services to our users and building core enabling technology that can eliminate click fraud and “splogging” on our networks in real time.” Cuban said in the announcement.

Think’s president, Scott Mitchell, likewise extolled the anti-splogging capabilities developed by IceRocket. Splogging, or spam blogging, refers to blogs created solely as holders of keywords and advertisements. They exist solely to collect advertising “clicks” and benefit the splog owner without providing any actual value to readers.

With Think’s technologies, IceRocket could become a revenue generator for blogs. Efforts by privately held BlogAds and Federated Media provide advertising for blog publishers; the Think services referenced by Rhodes could enable IceRocket to build a similar position.

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After I scanned all the chatter about Strumpette and his/her ridiculous and faceless prediction that I will not last in my new job, as an antidote I spent an hour watching this fascinating interview with Mark.

I hardly know Mark. We traded a few emails about blog search and he was kind enough to give me tickets to a Mavs game. Yet, I feel like he’s my unofficial mentor. I have read and re-read his outstanding lessons on success and motivation dozens of times. He is to me like Ann Rynd’s characters are to him – an inspiration. Now that some at least feel that I too am a “public figure,” I look to Professor Cuban for more wisdom. The timing of the interview’s release was perfect.

As I watched the piece I kept thinking “what would Mark do if he were in my situation?” What would he say if he pulled up an IceRocket search to find dozens of bloggers speculating that he was selling the Mavs or getting out of films or whatever the case may be. The answer is he would keep being Mark. Despite his billions, Mark makes himself completely approachable. He answers a good many of the 1000 emails he receives daily from fans and, I bet, foes. This shows he’s true to himself.

Mark Cuban is a maverick. No doubt. He saw the PC and broadband revolutions coming long before we did and, god bless him, he capitalized. More recently he turned around a fledgling basketball team by making them more fan-friendly. Now he’s trying to reinvent entertainment distribution, basketball and even PR in the process.

Mavericks have friends and they have enemies because they’re often successful revolutionaries. They’re pushing what Robert Scoble (another revolutionary) so eloquently calls the membrane. Mark is taking plenty of heat for his revolutionary plan to distribute movies on DVD at the same time they’re in the theaters. But you know what, he listens, occasionally takes on his critics and does his thing.

So that’s what I take away from this whole Smurfette episode. I listen, do my thing and continue to be part of the revolution. After all, that’s what I was hired to do. If I veer from that then I will let everyone down – me, my employer and perhaps even you. That’s not going to happen if I can help it. And I can.

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Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.

The owner of the Dallas Mavericks was gracious enough to take a few minutes today to touch base with me about how IceRocket deals with BlogSpot. I had observed in an article last week that Cuban’s blog search had banned BlogSpot blogs.

Cuban said today that isn’t the case. “We don’t filter out ALL BlogSpot blogs. We spend a lot of time scrubbing, we even added human intervention to try to make sure good BlogSpot blogs stay. And of course if we miss one, people let us know and we add it back.”

He noted that in a given month, IceRocket filters over a million splogs. “Sad thing now, is that although in absolute numbers BlogSpot hasn’t declined, there are so many new free host sites popping up that are nothing but splogs, as a [percentage] BlogSpot is declining.”

I was surprised to find IceRocket had made people part of the editing process, instead of relying wholly on technology. While Cuban would not get into specifics on the human facet of the splog fight (“Can’t give our secrets away,” he said), he did provide some enlightenment on how IceRocket conducts its fight against splogs:

Cuban sees splogs as such a problem for search engines that he disputes just how many truly fill an index. “Some other search sites are saying that 8 [percent] of their new blogs are splogs; then they are missing MILLIONS of them.”

He closed with an observation on a good way to figure out how many splogs are in a given search index: “Do a search on a word like casino. Since casinos pay a lot for referrals, that’s a good indication of the level of splogs in an index.”

David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business. Email him here.

Each time, I prepare some slides and/or talking points that illustrate “The Conversation Gap.” It’s a powerful technique that anyone can apply to demonstrate the blog marketing opportunity.

The concept is simple, yet it makes an important point. I try to show the communication/brand manager their share of the online conversation. I talk about the gap that exists between the number of conversations that are just about their category and the ones that are about their brand AND the category. This illustrates the gap they can narrow by getting more involved in the dialogue by having a blog. Here’s how you can tap into this.

For this exercise, I suggest using IceRocket’s Blog Trend Tool, one of my favorite gadgets. You can also use BlogPulse’s Trend Search tool, but I find IceRocket more effective here. I will use Midas – a company I have never met with – as an example here.

I enter two distinct searches in the conversation tool. One searches for all mentions of the word muffler or mufflers that do not mention the word midas. The boolean search phrase is “muffler OR mufflers -Midas.” The second search is inclusive: “Midas (muffler OR mufflers).” It shows me who is talking about Midas in the context of mufflers.

The result is this nice graph (also republished below). This enables me to see that Midas is missing the opportunity to be included in approximately 73 conversations per day (less spam blogs). Note that while this isn’t a perfect qualitative conversation analysis (because of spam blogs), it gives me a good idea of The Conversation Gap they can try to close.

Now, let’s take it a step further. Let’s see if Meineke – Midas’ #1 competitor – is doing any better. The answer, as you can see below, is not much…

This is when I tell the company I am addressing how they can close the gap with a blog. If there’s time, I also show them blogs that are talking about them. Each of the links underneath the chart generate blog search results for the boolean query as well as the number of sites linking to that particular blog. It gets their attention every time.

Give it a go the next time you need to sell someone – either internally or externally – on the value of blogging. Be sure to also mention that some of the results may be cluttered with spam blogs. However, since spam impacts each query equally, the share of voice should be the same regardless.

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Steve Rubel is a PR strategist with nearly 16 years of public relations, marketing, journalism and communications experience. He currently serves as a Senior Vice President with Edelman, the largest independent global PR firm.

He authors the Micro Persuasion weblog, which tracks how blogs and participatory journalism are changing the public relations practice.

The implication is that companies need to get involved in “the conversation” happening about them and their products or services.

In the years I’ve been reading blogs, I’ve heard sentiments like that over and over. While true, they are often not practical or “actionable” in corporate-speak. I’m starting to think of these notions as “blogger’s wisdom” because so many bloggers assume that they’re true, the implications are obvious, and the path into the future is a clear one.

I’m here to tell you that despite this blogger’s wisdom, we’re nowhere close to where we ought to be. Several years into this whole blogging thing, the technology and tools designed to facilitate this global conversation all suck.

Let’s see how!

It turns out that “getting involved” (i.e., posting a comment) is the easy part. Finding and subsequent monitoring of the conversations is far from easy. This manifests itself in three phases of the process that I’ll look at here in a top down fashion.

Broad Searches

To get a global sense of what people are saying about you, you can subscribe to a search on Technorati, Google Blog Search, Feedster, PubSub, IceRocket, etc. But what keywords do you choose? You’re subscribing to specific terms, not concepts. So if you choose the wrong ones, you end up with too much irrelevant info (and overload) or you miss important posts. This is easy for “yahoo” but harder for “windows” or “iraq.”

This assumes that the services you’re using have comprehensive and fresh indexes. I don’t believe that any of them have both. And that means you have to subscribe to all of them, wade thru the duplicates and spam, and identify those that are worth of actually clicking thru to read. That’s real work. Try it sometime.

Aggregators do a poor job of making this easy. The blog search “verticals” aren’t helpful either. They suffer from any number of real or perceived problems: slow and unstable (Technorati), incomplete (Google), contain lame advertising (Feedster), or are impossible for normal people to understand (PubSub).

Subscribing to Topical Blogs

If you work at Apple Computer, you’d obviously want to subscribe to as many of the Apple related blogs that you can find-the ones that write about Apple on a regular basis. But you need to find them (see previous phase). Once you do, you need to read them regularly. You’ll probably start by bookmarking them and trying to remember to read them all on a daily basis. In doing so, you also have to remember what’s new and what’s not.

Eventually you’ll have more than 20 or 30, get yourself an aggregator, and have to figure out that clicking on that stupid orange icon doesn’t do anything useful. Luckily RSS auto-discovery seems to be far more common that it was a few years ago. But the subscription model is still fundamentally broken. If the “Add to My Yahoo!” button didn’t exist, I’m sure tens of thousands of people wouldn’t have a way to track their favorite sites.

Most aggregators make it so easy to subscribe (once you figure out how) that self-inflicted overload soon follows. You find yourself spending far too much time trying to “unbold” the folders of news on your desktop. The aggregator does little to help manage the flow of information, show you what really matters to you, and hide the stuff that’s not important.

Comment Tracking

It took me a while to figure this out, but every aggregator I’ve seen has completely fails to make it easy to stay engaged in a discussion taking place in comments on one or more blog posts. I typically comment on a blog post and never remember to go back to see if anyone else commented on what I said. That’s not much of a “conversation,” is it?

Blogginng software isn’t very helpful in this respect either. Few blogs offers RSS feeds for the comments on a given post. And even if they do, aggregators don’t make it easy to manage those subscriptions (like automatically unsubscribing from them when they conversation dies off). Some blogs offer the option of getting an email alert when someone posts a comment on a discussion you’re interested in. But they don’t handle trackback or pingback “comments” at all, so you’re not seeing the whole conversation.

So comment tracking/monitoring ends up as a very manual process full of repeat visits, which means it’s very, very hard to scale.

Summary

The promise of the blogosphere is a loosely connected global network of conversations with an incredibly low barrier to entry. The reality is that the tools are still far too immature for the current scale of this growing network. Worse yet, most aggregators are designed to mimic e-mail or usenet news clients rather than embracing the highly connected nature of blog posts and comments, not the mention the typically short “decay” periods associated with the discussion around most posts.

What should we do?

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Jeremy Zawodny is the author of the popular Jeremy Zawodny’s blog. Jeremy is part of the Yahoo search team and frequently posts in the Yahoo! Search blog as well.

Visit Jeremy’s blog: Jeremy Zawodny’s blog.

“[I]f a blog that no one sees links to your blog, does that make your blog more popular? Of course not, it just means that one person (at least we hope its a person and not splog) knows about your blog and has offered a link,” muses Cuban on BlogMaverick.

It was this type of thinking that led to an experimental development he calls linktracker that counts the number of people, in real time, who have linked to a particular blog post (assumedly, not the entire blog). An update
is in the works that will also enable a running count of how many people have actually viewed that particular blog post.

Those wishing to use the feature have the option of the PHP Server Installed Version, or the IFrame based version that requires CSS.

The IceRocket crew is also working on the possibility of offering code that allows bloggers to pick a category that they are looking to be ranked in (Personal Diary, Entertainment, et cetera).