Searching the blogosphere

Scott Johnson from Feedster contacted me about my rant regarding Technocrati and Feedster (and pubSub).

I'll still say that these services and much of the blogging industry is becoming too difficult for too many, remembering that many coming to blogging have zero technical and usually very low internet experience.

He pointed out that is is indeed simple to get a subscription feed for searches. Too simple for my hurried eyes! There's an orange XML icon top right on any returned search. I see so many of these these days, I must be blind to them. Still, I can't get any such search feed to validate, thus I can't sub to them.

Yet, I can sub to exactly the same search criteria feeds in pubSub and the newer blogDigger. And I still cannot figure out how I can do such with Technocrati, I figure that there isn't such a feature there.

Also, Scott pointed out that there are reasons for claiming a feed, which I glanced over. Now glancing a bit slower, I can't see a compelling reason for going to the bother, especially as it'll be for the second time. (In the instructions for claiming a feed I missed the part about adding their special link and only their special link to a blog post, mine was buried deep in my rant, thus, it hasn't worked.) Putting only their link into a post is not for me and my site. I could drop an email explaining this, but I see no big benefit.

Again, I must emphasise that both Technocrati and much more so, Feedster are very opaque and difficult sites. Sure some things are easy, simple searching for instance, but others, for time pressed techies like me, are too detailed or too simple. For non-techies, well...
Saying that, the power of Feedster's advanced searching is wonderful if ever I needed such power, which I don't think I do at the moment.

I wonder if it's a case of Jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none? If blogDigger and pubSub can do search feeds, and do them so painlessly, and seemingly do nothing else (to my racing eyes, anyway), perhaps Feedster are doing too much.

Or, as I advised Scott, Feedster needs better navigation, a site map and better copy writers. And a sit down with the UI and somebody's mum ";->"