Saturday, June 17, 2006
No simple way to keep up with G.A. blogs.
Wouldn't it be convenient to track only UUA General Assembly-related blog posts next week? Unfortunately, I can't find an easy way to track everything in one place. UUpdates already limits searches to known UU blogs, but that leaves out the bazillion MySpace and LiveJournal pages that gossip hounds will want to watch. But I can't figure out how to limit the number of false positives at Technorati, which tracks MySpace and LiveJournal — but which also picks up all sorts of band listings for groups performing in Georgia and in Unitarian churches. If anyone else has a better search algorithm to suggest, please let me know. Here's what I'll be checking daily:
- UUpdates
- "GA" or "G.A." entries
- "General Assembly" entries
- "St. Louis" entries
- Technorati
- "General Assembly" or "GA" entries that also mention "UUA" or "Unitarian"
- Update: Scott Wells offers this even better algorithm
- Google Blog Search
- "GA" or "General Assembly" and "UUA"
Any other ideas?
Update 10:30pm: Denise, Dan, and Scott suggest including a unique tag — uuga06 or uuaga06 — in each G.A.-related post. Simply including the phrase in the body of your blog entry will help Google classify it properly. Those of us who can set categories or other tags for Technorati can do so, making the whole process much simpler. I've followed their advice and set up a UUGA06 category for Technorati's benefit.
Copyright © 2006 by Philocrites | Posted 17 June 2006 at 12:05 PM
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Commentary by Chris Walton on Unitarian Universalism, liberal Christianity, American religion, and liberal culture. Contact me.
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3 comments:
Denise:
June 17, 2006 04:52 PM | Permalink for this comment
I've been wondering if people would tag their GA posts in a similar fashion. I'd like to suggest UUGA2006 - (for technorati users or delicious users) - Including the phrase UU General Assembly 2006 would be nice in blogs where technorati and delicious aren't used.
I'm looking forward to the GA blogs, I just hope I can find them!
Dan Harper:
June 17, 2006 05:18 PM | Permalink for this comment
I'll be using the nonsense string "uuga06" in my GA blog entries to make it easier for me to find those entries using the search function on my site (I chose that string because it got no Google hits just now).
Eventually "uuga06" will come up on Google's blog search and their main search, depending on how fast Google's web crawlers find my site. If others embed that same string in all GA posts, eventually we'll have access to all of them via Google. Selfishly I hope others will consider this, so I can read lots of other GA blog posts.
Lynn:
June 19, 2006 07:43 AM | Permalink for this comment
In order for Livejournal users to be picked up in the Technorati Search, they must change the default setting in their profile which normally shields livejournal posts from most search engines.
I have done so for my journal and posted instructions on how to do so in the Unitarians Livejournal Community, which has 855 LiveJournal subscribers.
Here's a link to the Livejournal community post
http://community.livejournal.com/unitarians/499524.html#comments
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