ResearchBuzz

There was the time when I used Feedster a LOT. Visited every day, sometimes multiple times a day. Relied on it.

Now, not so much. But I did want to note that Feedster has announced a new 2.0 version. The URL is still Feedster.com .

It’s very… green. Mostly green (and, if you’re using Opera, all green with a warning message that you should get a different browser. Pleh.)

The blog announcement goes on at great length about the feedbuzz, and making widgets to go on your blog, &etc. Also mentioned is a tweaked search that is supposed to minimize spaham. I think it needs to be tweaked again; do a search for used cars and you’ll see what I mean. (And if you think that’s too much of a leader, search for Feedster and look at all the discontinued feed notification entries.) Speaking of search, Feedster does have some pretty spiffy operators but doesn’t promote them much. Visit http://feedster.com/help/search.php for a list of what can be done including some very nice site operators. (You can also search for podcasts now on Feedster, which is new from when I was using it.)

I seem to recall that Feedster used to offer an RSS feed for its search results. I don’t see that readily to hand. If I wanted to create a Widget that’s obvious, but if I want to just take an RSS feed and do my own thing with it, that’s a little tougher.

The advanced search options are intriguing but the search seems a bit slow and I’m not interested in playing with Feedster widgets. The number of standalone blog search engines I like remains at two: Bloglines and IceRocket.

Zuula, which I covered back in January , has expanded its blog search engine from four blog search engines to nine. The new search engines now available include Sphere, Blogdigger, and Bloglines (yay!)

And in case you forgot, Zuula also has Web, image, news, and job meta-search. It’s still in beta but it’s a nice little search engine.

Now this is an interesting idea. The Ageless Project, at http://jenett.org/ageless/, lists blogs by the birth years of their authors. As you might expect the majority of blogs listed are by bloggers born in the 1970s, but the directory lists bloggers born as early as 1911 to those born as late as 1988.

The site’s simple. You can do a keyword search or you can browse by decade of birth. (There are so many blogs from the 1970s that you can optionally browse that decade one half at a time.) The 1911 blogger unfortunately does not write in English, but the gentleman who was born in 1913 and writes Don to Earth does some really nice stuff. Blogs are listed with a screen thumbnail, name, year of birth, and name of blogs. Blogs open in a new window. I would really like more description than is provided but to be fair most of these are personal journals with not much in the line of specialty. (Though “My Mom’s Blog” has a recipe for a pie that includes ketchup. I’m going to have to make that for my husband.)

I’m surprised how many people from the 20s and 30s are blogging — awesome! To get an idea of how the site breaks out across ages, visit the stats page. There are a total of about just over 1700 blogs listed here. The site includes information on how to submit a site, but there are several restrictions (mostly concerning amount and type of advertising on sites.) A fun browse!

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