I’ve been thinking a lot about topic specific search lately. Google has a product that lets you search within a specific vertical, for example Linux, for content that’s evergreen. This used to be more open so you could define your own search, although the link eludes me right now. This of course updates with Google’s typical frequency, which can vary depending on how popular your site is. But what about time sensitive content. What about items like Twitter feeds?

Sure there’s search.twitter.com, formerly Summize, but what about including Plurk, Yammer or any of the other life streaming content into it? Friendfeed attempts to bring all this content to you, and does a good job, but what about other verticals? What if you knit and what you care about is yarn. A quick Google search for ‘yarn blog’ brings up some blogs; some are even about knitting, but generally lacking are good portals about all things yarn.

While portals have fallen out of fashion over the last 5 years, they’re purpose is not lost. Tech Crunch is certainly an important technology portal, even if it’s just called a blog. Mike Arrington has gathered one of the most comprehensive dataset about web startups and hardened internet companies around. So what about those knitters who are constantly looking for new information about yarn? Where can they turn for quick, one stop shopping, reliable information, industry trends and other bits about yarn? Nowhere! There are blogs, ecommerce stores, even industry news sites, but nothing that brings it all together as a good 1990’s .com would have.

At very least, I’m sure some tech-savvy knitter is out there putting together a nice search engine to leverage the Google (or perhaps Yahoo!) search results to create a single destination for knitting or yarn, or perhaps even needles. Is it possible to create a search engine, on the fly, for every possible vertical? Is it possible to create a portal that has content specific to every need, but only that need? The google search I ran for yarn was good, but there were people who were telling tales, often called yarns, on their blogs. Once I’ve selected the appropriate subset, I’d like to see the correct information, not all data - and the most important and most recent information at the top.

Photo by LollyKnit, courtesy of Flickr

Over the weekend I assisted with the launch of a new movie review blog, JohnnyVengeance.com. It promises to provide fresh insight, reviews and a little bit of irreverance while covering all the goodness that is Hollywood. Take a look at the reviews of Tropic Thunder and Mirrors, happy viewing.

I’m not sure when my love affair with Rackspace ended. Perhaps it was when we were brushed off as a client or when they began having catastrophic problems with their data centers. Either way, I thought it was funny when I saw an email today that they now have a corporate blog. I’ve been critical of Rackspace before and just wanted to highlight this additional failure of them as a company. With the astronomical fees they charge for server hosting, you would think they could have hired a PR firm a long time ago to tell them to get involved with their customers. This just seems like another last ditch effort to bring themselves into a web 2.0 culture that’s ready to move into new directions. They even have a token welcome to our blog entry from February. Someone please provide them some assistance with URL rewriting. The real test will be to see if they delete this trackback or are actually open to feedback and criticism on their blog.

Some folks may be asking why I don’t unsubscribe from their mailing lists… quite simply, I enjoy having fodder for these occasional rants.

The blog has been picked up by spammers. We are now receiving daily spam comments. This would be inconsequential, however, until only a few days ago I had a site map that did not include the blog entries thus preventing it from being indexed by Google. I removed that map around the 19th and so Google has since indexed the blog pages. I believe spammers are using Google (and possibly other search engines) to locate sites running WordPress and other blogging software and adding them to their bots in hopes the blogs are unmoderated. I know nothing earth shattering here, but curious that until I was indexed by Google’s search engine - not a single spam comment. I noticed a similar effect on my personal blog when I removed the registration requirement (still moderated) for posts.