What if it's not on my blog?
I can readily imagine a situation in which I want to access a snippet of information
that's actually only a thought that I posted as a comment on somebody else's blog.
How am I going to get to that? I suppose that a Google search (or better, a Google
blog search) on my name and some identifying element from the post I'm looking
for might find it, but I'd call that pressing my luck. I can well understand a
person who, after posting a comment to someone's blog also posts it to his or
her own blog. Though our first thoughts might be that this stems from a sense
of narcissism, there may be a much simpler explanation: in that way they can save
those comments and have access to them without having to run a complex, and not
necessarily successful, search for them.
But this is clearly not only an issue with me. During the preparation of this
column we
read that Lijit.com had purchased a company called BigSwerve:
BigSwerve, which was formed in 2006, has indexed more than 400 million comments from 3 million authors. Lijit plans to integrate the BigSwerve technology into their personal search engine product to learn more about the sphere of influence that publishers in their network have.
In other words, the comments that we leave on other people's blogs will be among
all the other items of ours that Lijit will be able to find and aggregate for
us. That sort of possibility would have been nice back in the days when we were
actively participating in online forums.
Go to: One tool to rule them all?