Blog Search Blabble.com Takes New Approach
A new start-up joining the ranks of weblog tools, Blabble is aimed at the corporate market. According to an Internet Retailer article, the service will be fee-based when it officially launches in October. A beta is currently available free online. The article reads like Blabble will be something similar to what IBM is developing with WebFountain.
Blabble defines what they’re doing as “thought parsing.” From the article, “Existing software products aggregate listings from blogs, but require the user seeking a view of overall trends or opinions as represented in blogs to read through all the blog listings to make that determination manually. [Company founder Matt] Rice says Blabble goes a step farther by incorporating natural language processing that parses blog listings returned in a search into parts of speech so as to extract from them words, phrases and constructions that indicate opinion. ‘50,000 people may write about a topic, but you don’t have time to read 50,000 listings,’ says Rice. ‘And I probably don’t care about one individual opinion; it’s the aggregate that I care about.’ Blabble doesn’t crawl the web in response to a search, instead drawing from its own searchable database that aggregates content from what are currently more than 2 million blog authors.
To fill and grow its database, it secures lists of blogs and also draws from companies that provide consumers with software and platforms for creating blogs. Blabble gets a direct feed from such companies so every change or addition to a posted blog is captured, which keeps its database current.”
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Gary Price is a Washington DC Librarian and Editor of ResourceShelf
