The Weblog Metadata Initiative is trying to interconnect information about weblogs from different sources, such as Blogdex, the Blogosphere Ecosystem, and weblogs.com. So far, they seem interested primarily in collecting data about various blogs’ popularity and the links between blogs — but this seems like an important first step towards making weblog information more manageable and searchable.
RSS syndication is very useful for aggregating current weblog posts, so you can see what’s new on a whole bunch of weblogs at once. But what if you want to do a search across many weblogs for a single term, or for posts relating to a certain concept? Your best best is to use Google, clicking on search results and following links, one after another. What I want is a way of aggregating weblog content on a single page — not just the most current posts, but archived content that meets various criteria I specify. Is there a way to do this now? I don’t know of one.
