The blogosphere is a beautiful thing. Want to stay up-to-date on what's happening with the Iraq elections? There's a blog that's only a few weeks old that's dedicated just to that.
By a tech engineer in North Carolina, Iraq Elections Newswire says it's "up-to-the-minute news stories, opinion, and blog posts on the 2005 Iraqi elections. Coverage will continue well past Jan 2005."
The posts look to be decent digests of the various wire service items, newpaper articles, op-eds, and analyses from a broad range of sources. The obvious stuff -- NYT, LA Times, CSMon, Time, etc, plus gov't sites (DoD, State), plus news agencies (Xinhua, India, Turkey) -- but he's also got journals like Foreign Affairs and all parts of the political spectrum. You want NRO, you got it. And if you want Socialists Workers [UK], you got that too.
Fascinating just looking at the cross-section of who's saying what!
This is another example of the Long Tail phenomenon I pointed out with the earlier post on Circadiana.
And BTW, I found it by trying out a "search/navigation" service that focuses on the blogosphere that looks pretty amazing. It's called Waypath. It's based on innovations in "contextual navigation" that looks to combine some of the better aspects of a classic Google-type search engine with cross-linking of social bookmarks like del.icio.us or flickr, if you get my drift.
You kinda have to see it to understand it. Here's the link to the query page [search "Iraq elections"] that came up right away with the Iraq Elections Newswire blog. I'm not being very articulate today, and I haven't played with it enough to fully grasp how it works. So if you want a better sense of the range of query logic available, including fuzzy and "in the neighborhood" searches, better check out their search syntax here.
It's definitely the niftiest toy I've come across in a while (other than del.icio.us itself, which I finally got around to testing a couple of days ago and am now absolutely hooked! It's what I've been dreaming about for ages and didn't even know that's what I wanted.) I've put my del.icio.us/nadezhda items in chez Nadezhda's sidebar.
Under "cool tools," Waypath has bookmarklets that you can put on your own blog that let people use Waypath to find related items on the web, or more narrowly other related blog posts. And they also have Waypath plugins for blogs, so you can include posts from related sites or on related topics on your blog. Plugins are available for MT, Radio, WordPress and other php blogs, and a module for Drupal. The blurb for the MT plugin explains what they're for:
This is a plugin for Movable Type that works in the MTEntry context and inserts a "related posts from Waypath" section, containing links to and abstracts of posts that discuss similar topics to ones in your weblog, even when those posts aren't linked to yours. It's a great complement to trackbacks and blogrolls.
Looks like it's still at the "toy" stage, since it has quite a lot of blogs and posts available through their search engine, but it's not got a lot of updated material -- maybe ran out of steam for awhile during Dec and early Jan. I'd guess the developers' attention has been focused on their for-profit projects lately.
But hopefully they'll get the thing up and motoring, because it looks like it has awesome potential to take off like del.icio.us and flckr. They've got bigger scalability issues than either of those services, because as they accumulate more blogs and posts they've got to make filtering it easier for users. But if they can crack those problems, the flexibility and "nuance" of the search results has the potential to be pretty amazing.
BTW - Chris Anderson's competition results for the "best" definitions of the Long Tail are great. My favorite slogans: “Trickle-up economics!”—Joshua Wood. And worst pun -- partly because it's all too true --
The first afoe European weblog awards