Would this give blogs street cred?:
Marketing Magazine. Jim Carroll. Corporate weblogs.[John Robb's Radio Weblog]It likely won't be too long before we see an official Harley-Davidson blog that features ongoing commentary, news and updates from an "evangelist" within the Harley organization. Featured within the main Harley-Davidson site, the effort will emerge as a powerful means by which the company can further cement its digital relationship with its customers. Harley has a new model coming out? It's reported directly to Harley fans through the blog. Someone is doing a cross-country bike ride on a Harley with the monies collected going to a charity? Write it into the blog. A new Harley ad is released? Link it in the blog, and viewers will follow.
6:18:45 PM 
say what []
Google loves blogs. Blogs loves Google. But is there trouble in paradise? When items slip of the front page of most blogs, there is an anecdotal two- to three-week delay before archived items are reindexed. As Dylan Tweney points out this is an artifact of the fact that Google's basic unit of indexing is the web page URL and blogs are more fine-grained: the post as the basic unit, usually multiple posts on a single page.
Permalinks arose to address this same issue, allowing post-level targetting of links to web posts. This is generally implemented with named anchors within pages, although it's also possible to assign each entry its own page in the archives, even if several entries are aggregated at any one time on the blog's index page.
Dylan has a suggestion, though, to help the Googlesphere catch up with the blogosphere:
As it turns out, we do have a couple of data formats that understand the difference between a post and a page, include useful summary data, and even include handy pointers back to the exact archive location of a post. They're called RSS and RDF.It seems that the same approach would work when indexing an intranet or enterprise portal. Maybe part of the solution for turning k-logs into a true knowledge sharing system is to make sure the search implementation indexes RSS feeds from k-logs, making knowledge retrieval possible without discontinuities.
These syndication formats are used to aggregate news, but they could be useful indexing tools too. What if Google (or Daypop, once they can afford to buy a few new hard drives) collected RSS and RDF feeds — and then archived them in a searchable index?
Instead of news stories scrolling off into oblivion when they get to the bottom of a feed, they'd enter a permanent index where they could be used for information retrieval later.
3:31:08 PM say what []
The site search feature of Google's free custom search offering works by default only for sites whose addresses are root-level URLs (so, for example, you can use it out-of-the-box to search jrobb.userland.com or blogs.salon.com but not blogs.salon.com/0001111/).
With the help of Ian Landsman and a few other readers over the weekend, I've come up with code that produces a custom Google search of just this blog. I've in fact replaced my calendar with it (well, I've moved the calendar to the bottom of my masthead column anyway, on the theory that robots may still find it useful).
I want to offer the code to anyone to copy and tweak, but I've learned that posting code (even escaped-out code) to a blog entry tends to upset news aggregators, so instead I've written up the learning process with a few code samples as a story.
categories: salonika knowhow metablog radioactive
10:45:07 AM say what []
