Tracking the blog world

The ability to sort and search through blogs and media sites is one of the Web’s holy quests. Dozens of sites have started trying to find and summarize what the rest of the blog world is doing.

One recent trend is letting the user community assign value to what they read around the Web. Digg does this, primarily in the area of technology.

A beta site, Wikio.com, tries to take blog searching one step further; its ranking of most popular and most viewed Web entries is based both on user comment and on a relevance method developed by its own staff.

As the Wikio blog explains, the relevance score for any entry is based on date of publication, length of text, location of the search term in the article and then, finally, user voting.

How does it work in practice? We popped “U.S. Figure Skating Championships” last week into the search frame.

The top three cited entries were: a London Examiner story on skater Mirai Nagasu, a Seattle Times story on skaters Tanith Belbin and Ben Agosto, and a New York Times story on skater Kimmie Meissner.

The site is in beta. It’s also just landed $5.3 million in funding, so expect it to get better in the next three months.

Smart Search is a regular feature of .TXT.