From their interactive graphs to their iPhone-optimized mobile site to their tracking of who shares what items when, Delicious is showing a deep understanding of where the real-time web is heading and how traffic in this environment works. They're giving users and content creators the tools they need to optimize for this environment. Read on for a complete list of Delicious' new flavors.

They've also added interactive graphs for periods more than 24 hours before the current time. Users can highlight an area on the graph and search for results that appeared within that time frame.

Who, What, Where?
A feature we love is the addition of recipient tags to a user's bookmarks. The tags show what bookmarks were sent to a Twitter account or emailed to a friend.

iPhone-Optimized Mobile Site
iPhone users will now get a richer and simpler bookmarking and link-saving experience. Delicious' post reads, "Use your to:read tag and read all those articles you've been meaning to read. Alternatively, see what's popular on the 'Explore' page or search for whatever happens to peak your interest."

Graphs
The graphs seen on search results pages are now also available on URL details pages and in the revamped Tagometer badges, which will now show the number of saved links over time on a graph.

URL Details
Data on links is now available in a much more digestible format, complete with graphs, of course!

Especially for mobile users and those with social media obsessions, this new suite of features seems to be as useful as well as fun to play with.

1. Mutual reinforcement of user expertise and document quality: A user's expertise in a particular topic depends on the quality of the documents she or he has found, and the quality of documents in turn depends on the expertise of the users who have found them.
2. Discoverers vs. followers: Expert users should be discoverers - they tend to be faster than others to identify new and high quality documents...SPEAR gives more credit to users the earlier they find high quality documents.

After analyzing more than 500,000 Delicious users and 2 million shared bookmarks, the solution produced a set of trustworthy users. No spammers were found in the top 200 recommendations.

While there are obvious uses for SPEAR in shopping and friend recommendation engines, says Noll, "The SPEAR algorithm itself is not restricted to the online world. We imagine to use SPEAR, for example, for estimating the expertise of researchers by analyzing scientific publications. Such publications - whether available as online versions or printed out on paper - provide all the information we need."

Expertise may have an algorithm across all industries. Be first and be fascinating. For more information on SPEAR visit Michael G. Noll's site.

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Purchase The ReadWriteWeb Q2 2009 VC Funding Report

Our Second Premium Report for Businesses

We're excited to announce the availability of ReadWriteWeb's Q2 2009 VC Funding Report, our second premium report powered by data from ChubbyBrain. We have been tracking early-stage investment in Internet, mobile and SaaS since the financial crisis in September 2008 and we believe that this report is unlike anything else you've seen.

Our Report gives you the facts on 240 deals closed in April, May and June - who invested, in what company, how much they invested and when. Read on to see what's included in the guide and how to purchase it.

Web Trends

Could Real Time Information Be An Unfair Advantage?

The US Securities and Exchange Commission is considering a ban on a stock market practice known as "flash trading," where supercomputers get access to information milliseconds before other traders. This raises similar issues about the growing prominence of real-time information on the web.

Web Squared: When Web 2.0 Meets Internet of Things

Recently Tim O'Reilly and John Battelle released a white paper entitled Web Squared: Web 2.0 Five Years On. It's a none to subtle attempt to re-brand web 2.0. But less cynically, the report also nicely applies Web 2.0 principles onto the emerging Internet of Things.

Twitter's Most Active Users: Bots, Dogs, and Tila Tequila

Only 5% of Twitter's users account for 75% of all the activity on the service, and almost one third of all the tweets posted by the most active users come from bots that each generate more than 150 tweets per day. According to a new report, one quarter of all the messages posted on Twitter are currently generated by bots.

As the EBook Market Matures, Amazon Will Face Stiff Competition

eBooks and eReaders are slowly but surely becoming mainstream. However, while Amazon is the current market leader among early adopters of this technology, there will be a lot of opportunities for other players in the market - including Sony and large mass-market retailers like Walmart.

Why Cloud Computing is the Future of Mobile

The term "cloud computing" is being bandied about a lot these days, mainly in the context of the "future of the web." But cloud computing's potential doesn't begin and end with the personal computer's transformation into a thin client - the mobile platform is going to be heavily impacted by this technology as well.

SEE MORE WEB TRENDS COVERAGE IN OUR TRENDS CATEGORY

A Word from Our Sponsors

We'd like to thank ReadWriteWeb's sponsors, without whom we couldn't bring you all these stories every week!

• Mashery is the leading provider of API management services.
• WeeBiz, a business community where you can find and share new business opportunities.
• Domain.ME, the official registry for all .ME Domains.
• Mollom, stop comment spam and build your community.
• Crowd Science gives you detailed visitor demographics.
• hakia is a semantic search engine.
• Rackspace provides dedicated server hosting.
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• IronScale, Managed Hosting. The Cloud Gets Physical.
• MediaTemple provides hosting for RWW.
• SixApart provides our publishing software MT4.

ReadWriteEnterprise

Our channel devoted to 'enterprise 2.0' and using social software inside organizations. Sponsored by Socialtext.

Enterprise 2.0: Awareness is Easier Than Execution, Says Nielsen

In a new report studying social networking on intranets, Web usability guru Jakob Nielsen asserts that despite broad awareness, real execution of Web 2.0 in the enterprise is still rare at this point. This is a sobering reminder of just what it takes to make change happen in business.

ReadWriteStart

Our channel ReadWriteStart, sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark, is dedicated to profiling startups and entrepreneurs.

How to Scale Without Losing Your Shirt

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

There comes a time for every venture when the owners have to decide whether hockey-stick-like growth is feasible or not. In your initial plan, you indicated a sudden surge in revenue at a certain point in time, i.e. where the hockey stick shows up. You have now reached that point. You may have a great business, but will it hit the big time?

SEE MORE STARTUPS COVERAGE IN OUR READWRITESTART CHANNEL

Web Products

MySpace to Unveil Integration With Sites Around the Web, Using Open Standards

MySpace will announce in the next few weeks a major new feature being added to its MySpaceID product that will allow third-party websites to write updates into the MySpace activity feed just like Facebook Connect, but will also incorporate open semantic microformat code too.

Delicious Reborn as Real-Time News Tracker

Yahoo's social bookmarking service Delicious launched a new home page this week, combining recent tagging activity and cross-referenced links on Twitter to deliver what it calls the hottest news from around the web in real time.

Digg Opening Up? New Read/Write API Coming Soon

The social news community at Digg.com may be on the verge of opening up. A forthcoming Digg API will allow people to "not only read data, but also contribute data, too." In other words, a Read/Write API.

SchoolRack Gives Teachers, Students, Parents Interactive Resources Online

SchoolRack is a resource for grade school and high school teachers to create their own websites where they can communicate and interact with their students and those students' parents.

Spotify to Close Up to $50M Round Before US Launch

In anticipation of the company's US launch, the on-demand music streaming site Spotify is finalizing what is rumored to be a $50 million dollar round of investments. This will value the Swedish company at $250 million dollars.

SEE MORE WEB PRODUCTS COVERAGE IN OUR PRODUCTS CATEGORY

That's a wrap for another week! Enjoy your weekend everyone.

It is something the site probably should have done a while ago and if done correctly could make other services, like Digg, look all the more behind the times. The move could also help Delicious survive the coming Yahoo Search purge at the hands of Bing.

We've long believed that Delicious is one of the most under-appreciated social media services remaining from the early days of the social web. This new version could help win back some of the early love, but it does represent a radical shift away from the original vision most people have of the service as a tool for bookmarking things you want to return to later. The founder of Delicious, Joshua Schacter, said on Twitter last night "i hate the delicious twitter integration (sharing != saving) but i like the new search a great deal."

The pressure on Digg to find a way to speed up the pace with which it surfaces news on its front page has got to be growing. Note that Delicious hasn't decided to put its links inside a toolbar as Digg, StumbleUpon and many other services have. That's nice.

For a closer look at Delicious and the real-time web, see our recent posts Five Great Delicious Hacks, in Five Minutes, for Delicious's 5th Birthday and our Introduction to the Real-Time Web.

The Twitter firehose feed content will belong to a new microblog designation that Spinn3r will also use for indexing other microblogging services. The rankings will consider the relationships and links between users and determine the top 10,000 accounts over four social and link-sharing networks.

The rankings cover FriendFeed, Twitter, Digg, and Delicious. Unfortunately, there is no "harmony of the rankings." Each service has its own top-users list. From the Spinn3r blog:

"Sources are ranked by authority whereby the more friends or inbound links you have, the higher your rank... We do not consider raw inbound link count to be an accurate representation of authority. This is highly vulnerable to spam and rank errors as users who attract a large number of links (either through black hat methods, link baiting, or viral marketing) can inflate their rankings..."

"We consider the quality of inbound links to be far more important... The authority for a source is not a direct function of raw inbounds links. Some users can have high authority but very few (relative) inbound links."

The algorithm also considers interactions between friends within networks and connections to "seed" users who were hand-picked based on their in-network clout. Neither Twitter nor Facebook has been fully indexed or ranked yet, but the Spinn3r rankings site says this is a mere matter of time.

This first version of the rankings is published manually and only once; future support will be determined based on user reactions. Spinn3r also hopes to add rankings by vertical to determine the strongest users in political, technological, and other fields.

But now, that's all changing...or so they say. The company has basically scrapped their original concept in a revamp that's more of a "makeunder" than it is a "makeover." The new Secondbrain focuses on making bookmarking simpler while ditching most of the service's other features.

What's Gone from Secondbrain

Regular Secondbrain users will have to deal with the most dramatic fallout from this switch, starting with the fact that some of their content has gone missing. Imported content like pictures, videos, bookmarks, etc. from other social media services no longer exists in the new Secondbrain. Only content imported manually or with the Secondbrain bookmarklet remains.

The new Secondbrain also no longer does social media synchronization or importing of Delicious bookmarks. These are temporary limitations as the company decides on how to reintroduce these features in a more user-friendly way. For now, Delicious bookmarks can only be imported manually by browsing for and selecting your exported bookmark file generated by Delicious for import into the service.

Also gone is the lifestreaming-like feature which let you follow other users and all the content they were sharing. Perhaps realizing that sites like Facebook and FriendFeed dominate in this area, Secondbrain has decided to switch this option off, now allowing you to follow specific collections only. These collections are sets of aggregated content (blog posts, photos, videos) on a particular subject. Here are some popular collections to give you an idea. All content added to Secondbrain has to go into a collection now, but it no longer has to be tagged - that has become an optional feature.

If you choose to use this part of the service, Secondbrain almost becomes an alternative RSS reader of sorts, pulling in filtered lists of "best of" content on topics you care about. Even better, you can just grab the RSS feeds for the collections themselves (a feature added last week) and pull them into your preferred feed reader instead.

Is It Worth Revisiting?

Overall, the new service may appeal to those who are still actively using social bookmarking and unlike similar sites like Delicious or Diigo, you don't follow people, you follow specific sets of content people create. (Diigo's "groups" feature would be the best comparison).

Still, the bigger question about the new Secondbrain isn't whether or not the new simplified service will appeal, but whether or not social bookmarking is even all that hot of a service anymore. It almost seems as if social bookmarking was just a pre-cursor to the social media sharing types of services we use today, like Twitter or Facebook. Because, really, if you want to casually share a link with your friends, what services do you turn to these days?

Social bookmarking still makes sense in some cases - like organizing research, sharing all the links discussed in a podcast, or compiling topic-based resource guides. In those niches, Secondbrain could still have a shot at staying afloat, but their real shot at glory may have already come and gone.

We've posted below a series of charts showing how many people clicked through that article hour by hour and from where they came. It's just one blog post, but this example sheds some light on a few interesting questions people are asking about the social web.

Here's how it went down. I was scanning RSS feeds Monday morning and discovered Rankin's video in the feed for Delicious Popular. I assumed that one of our competitors had written about it already, but in looking around I couldn't find anyone at all who had. I sat on it for hours, unfortunately writing another post about Twitter and one from a news tip I got via Twitter (is there anything else to write about these days?).

At 3 PM PST I wrote up the post about Rankin's class. I embedded her video and added more examples of Twitter in classrooms and related resources discovered on Delicious. I visited delicious.com/tag/twitter+classroom, opened up several pages worth of recent bookmarks using the Autopagerize Greasemonkey Script, then sorted all the bookmarks visible by number of saves using the Delicious Sort Visible Links script. That made it easy to find high quality related links to include in the post.

The post could have been much better written than it was, but it did much, much better than I expected it to. It was also an exception to the rule gleaned from a much larger aggregate study we wrote about last year finding that 4 PM PST on a Monday is one of the worst times to put up a blog post if you want it to get social media traction.

At 4 PM I put up the post and Tweeted out the link. 500 people clicked through and read it in the first hour, mostly from Twitter but some from Google Reader.

Note that Twitter desktop clients, a thousand random URL shorteners and other factors lead to a major under-counting of actual traffic from Twitter. Imagine the Twitter line below bumped up but trends remaining the same.

Traffic slowed a bit, then the post made it to the bottom of Delicious Popular after three hours. From there it hit aggregator site PopURLs, the secret winner in all these numbers. Traffic stayed strong throughought the night (West Coast night, that is) except for a short dip at 3 AM. Then the East Coast of the US started waking up and people started sharing and bookmarking the post again.

The link moved from Delicious Popular to the much more popular outright front page of Delicious.com at 9 AM PST, leaving PopURLs in the dust for a few hours. A steady trickle of visitors kept coming in that morning from Facebook.

Suddenly, perhaps because it was lunch time (noon) on the West Coast and 3 PM near or at the end of school on the East Coast, a flood of people started coming in from Twitter and elsewhere. It was 20 hours after we wrote, published and Tweeted about the article ourselves. I sat down to lunch with an iPhone developer thinking the post had lived out its short-term life at several thousand views, only to come out of lunch to discover a huge spike in readers.

Twitter search and archives are such a mess that it's probably impossible to reconstruct exactly what happened at noon, but it may have been that people got some free time, found the link on the front page of Delicious and then Twittered it out to friends. It's also possible that Delicious and Twitter users are different but overlapping groups and there's some other explanation for the Twitter spike. Google Reader click-throughs were at a day-long high at the same time.

As fast as the influx of traffic came, it was gone again. Within two hours all the sources of traffic had fallen back to their half-day lows, except for the slowly growing Facebook referrals.

Note the "other" category above includes small contributors like FriendFeed, JimmyR.com and OurSignal - but it also includes a whole lot of Twitter desktop clients and other hard-to-track sources.

A Few Take Aways

I've spent some time throughout the day looking at this data and have thought of the following:

Obviously PopURLs is not to be forgotten. It's old school, not exclusively focused on tech but clearly remains a popular place to find content.

Twitter is clearly becoming a major traffic driver, though this was a post about Twitter. It's very interesting that the spike in Twitter traffic came almost a full day after the first wave of Tweets about this article. Something else kicked it off, it's hard to say what.

ReadWriteWeb should probably be developing a bigger presence on Facebook. It's much bigger than all of these other sites but just barely made the chart for traffic. It stayed steady throughout the 24 hour period, though.

This wasn't the kind of post that was going to do well on Digg or Hacker News but those aren't the only games in town. I thought it might do well on StumbleUpon but it hasn't yet.

There's an interesting rhythm in that chart of traffic by sources, isn't there? What other patterns of interest do you see?

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Sean Ammirati, Doug Coleman Dana Oshiro, Steven Walling and Lidija Davis.

On the infrequently-updated company blog, the sole remaining employee Mike Koss shared the news about the additional funding, saying it was a "small round" but enough to enable Faves.com to operate for 2+ years, even without increasing the site's revenue.

He also shared some of the plans he has for the new Faves.com, a site that will no longer be solely focused on social bookmarking in the traditional sense, but will try to increase its relevancy in today's era of the social web by allowing for integration with Twitter, Facebook, and other services.

Koss also talked about the Ma.gnolia disaster and, in the spirit of full disclosure, wanted to make sure Faves users understood the status of the service. Specifically, Koss noted that Faves exists in a fairly large-scale data center with four front-end web servers and six back-end database servers. Nightly incremental backups are made as well as weekly complete data snapshots, but no recent full-scale data recovery test has been done. He also said that improving site performance and reliability going forward would be one of the challenges he has to face.

On the one hand, it was refreshing to hear Koss speak honestly about where Faves is now and where it's going, but on the other, it can easily make one feel a little wary of using a service that was only recently gasping for air. That said, as long as Faves.com isn't your primary service for storing your bookmarks, it's probably going to be OK to just enjoy using it as the new social utility it aims to become. Now the question is: will you?

Make no mistake about it, the vast majority of people on the web still have no idea that they can save their bookmarks outside their browsers. Yahoo has done a terrible job leveraging and growing this incredible database of user-categorized links of interest. Now the company is giving developers an opportunity to do so. Why is this important? Read on for some examples of what's now possible thanks to BOSS/Delicious integration.

BOSS is a technology that allows any website to use the Yahoo index and search processing power to build a topic-specific search engine on their own site. What could BOSS plus Delicious look like?

Some query types we can imagine being made possible by this integration are:

* I do a news search for a topic like the Textron buy-out or golfer Ross Fisher (two hot search terms today) and BOSS + Delicious shows me which URLs in my list of search results have been tagged "analysis" the most, or "biography."

* Search an index of food blogs for recipes and tell me which of them have been bookmarked the most and have been tagged "Mediterranean" and "vegetarian." The words Mediterranean and vegetarian may not appear anywhere in the text of the recipe, but human readers can recognize the recipe as fitting into both those categories and tag it as such when bookmarking it.

* Look up the links that my blog commenters post along with their comments and show me the top tags that other people have used to categorize those links. Perhaps, more marketers than engineers commented on my last blog post. I'd like to know that. Perhaps, I've had an influx of teachers, preachers or veterinarians commenting on my blog lately. Who wouldn't want to see that kind of data?

These are just a few examples of the kinds of data that we can imagine BOSS + Delicious offering up. We're sure readers can noodle just a bit on permutations of URL, times bookmarked, and top tags in order to come up with all kinds of other scenarios. Any time you've got millions of people saying "this link is important to me and these are the words I'd use to describe it" then that's really valuable information to be able to access programmatically.

Now imagine what could happen if Yahoo helped more people discover social bookmarking and opened up even more access to that data. It's absolutely tragic that this hasn't happened yet, but perhaps a little BOSS action is the beginning. If knowledge and information are value, then Yahoo has taken a small pipe connected to a potentially huge reservoir of black gold and let it just run down the drain, unused for the last three years. Yahoo adopted a baby with the potential to grow into an incredible adult and then forgot to feed and care for it for three years. It's quite upsetting.

It would be great if Delicious saw continued development in directions that supported this data-centric approach of leveraging crowdsourced attention signals. We're not sure how much hope for that is warranted though, given that so little progress has been made in that direction so far.

Disclosures: The author is a member of a Yahoo! Product Advisory Council and has multiple consulting clients in or around the social bookmarking sector.

Where Are the Other Cloud Agents?

Back in December, we wrote about the rise of cloud agents (a term coined by Chris Arkenberg). These agents are automated applications that help us parse through the data swarming around us to provide us with the information we need. At the time, we highlighted a service similar to Tweecious called Twitchboard, another app that also posts the links you tweet to Delicious. According to the Twitchboard site, more services beyond Delicious were "coming soon," but here it is April now, and no others have been integrated. That's disappointing to say the least, but what's even more disappointing is that these sorts of "cloud agents" are so few and far between.

At the time of the previous post, some people missed the overall point, thinking we were raving about a Twitter to Delicious cross-posting app. The truth is, we were excited about this concept of automated agents. Unfortunately, since that time, we've seen very few apps that fit the description. In fact, only a couple of others really come to mind...and to be frank, we're not sure if they even count.

One such service is SocialToo, a "social web companion" which has the ability to automate many tedious Twitter tasks like catching you up on your follows, unfollowing people who didn't follow you back, deleting all your friends, or automatically following people for you. It's the service's automated, "set it and forget it" behavior that we think might allow it to be classified as a cloud agent. Another is "Twollo," a Twitter service that finds like-minded tweeters and follows them for you automatically.

Within the Twitter ecosystem, there are probably slews of others which we just can't think of right now. But do apps that automate tasks within Twitter count as cloud agents? They're not all parsing information to separate signal from noise (well, maybe Twollo is), they're just saving us time. We would love to see some "real" cloud agents emerge that provide more than just automation. We want intelligent cloud agents, too. Know of any?

After installing a small Firefox plugin, Facette adds two icons to your status bar - one for bookmarking new pages and one for accessing your bookmarks. The Facette site itself presents both the standard, tag-based view of your bookmarks and Facette's own, more structured data. Because Facette sits on top of Delicious, all your Facette bookmarks are automatically also available on your default Delicious page. Indeed, Facette works by creating a number of new tags in your Delicious library.

Being a research project, Facette is still a little bit rough around the edges, but it looks like a great way to keep your Delicious library more organized - especially when you are using Delicious to keep track of a larger research project. If you decide to use Facette, the developers also request that you sign up for a user study on the homepage, though this is completely optional.

When we first reviewed Qitera, we already liked it a lot. Qitera's main emphasis is on creating a search engine for your bookmarks, no matter whether the bookmarked sites were on the public Internet or hidden behind the paywall of a for-profit database. Qitera is a very capable social bookmarking site with all the standard features you would expect, but what really sets it apart from its closest competitors is its search functionality.

Search Engine Integration

Whenever you do a search on Google or Yahoo after installing or updating the Qitera plugin, the top three search results from your bookmarks will automatically appear at the top of the search results. These results will include your own bookmarks, as well as bookmarks from your friends and colleagues on Qitera.

As Qitera's Joerg Lamprecht points out in the announcement, we often search for the same things over and over again (and so do our friends). By first displaying search results from sites that you have already bookmarked before showing results from the Internet, you can break this cycle and get faster access to a set of search results that you have already marked as relevant by bookmarking them in the first place.

From a business perspective, this integration with Google and Yahoo also makes perfect sense for the company. By seeing the Qitera bookmarks every time you search, you are far more likely to return to Qitera and make it the default app for your bookmarks.

Last month, Qitera also released a better integration with Yahoo's delicious. You can now import your delicious bookmarks to Qitera, though sadly, this is only a one-way street so far. We would also like to see the possibility to sync your Qitera bookmarks back to delicious.

In the last two months, Qitera has also addressed a few of the other problems that we discovered when we first tested the site. You can now, for example, get an RSS feed with the latest updates from your social network on Qitera, and the service now also finally recognizes duplicates.

Coming Soon: Qitera for the Enterprise

Qitera has also announced that it is developing an enterprise version of its service, which it will be launching at Cebit in March.

First of Its Kind?

We think this integration with Google and Yahoo is a great step forward for Qitera, and we are not aware of any other social bookmarking service that has created a similar plugin. If you haven't tried Qitera, we definitely think it is worth a try.

For a more in-depth look at all of Qitera's features, please refer to our review of the service from last December.

There's something strangely appealing about watching playericious do what it does. Part of it is the ability to focus the results on what you'd like to see, and part of it likely has to do with that "I wonder what's coming next?" appeal of services like StumbleUpon. Well, and then there's the fact that it's just so easy.

The one drawback is that playericious uses frames. That means that any time a page with a frame-busting script comes by, the service throws an error and stops working. I only encountered this issue a few times. But it does happen.

The developer claims that the service isn't terribly useful. But I'd beg to differ. After a week of saving new bookmarks, I found it incredibly useful to point playericious at my account and let it run - simply to refresh my memory about what I had found.

Take a few minutes to test drive playericious. I'm sure you'll find something interesting to do with it, too.

Photo: Schachter at ETech05, prior to the Yahoo! acquisition.

For more details check out our analysis on Jobwire, our site tracking new hires in tech and new media.

Identifying top niche blogs is invaluable knowledge for anyone wanting to enter, study or market to people in a particular field. It's one of the fastest and most effective ways to learn the lay of the land and get involved in the community of successful artists, real estate agents or 4-H club leaders using social media. I've been seeing a lot of demand for this information lately so I thought I'd write up some quick pros and cons of the options I'm familiar with. Perhaps you'll add some of your own favorite methods in comments.

Unfortunately, Technorati's not what it used to be anymore. While we here at RWW are very proud to have climbed to the #14 spot in the Top 100 most linked-to blogs overall in the Technorati Index (look out Perez Hilton, you're next in line) the fact of the matter is that for everyday use Technorati doesn't feel very reliable anymore.

How then can you identify the top blogs in a particular niche field? There are paid services you can use to identify influencers online but they are expensive and not appropriate for quick hits in a new topic. I'm all for paid services but in this case, let's talk about options that are fast and free. Given the need to classify a lot of content with minimal human intervention, this could be a great place for Semantic Web technology to come in.

Here's a comparison of the pros and cons of six different services you can use to do so. None are as solid a solution as the blogosphere deserves. This is a huge opportunity for indexes, but one that will be hard to fill since an index has to be wide and deep to be truly useful for this purpose.

Technorati

Pros:

The Technorati Blog Finder. was set up for just this purpose and in earlier days claiming and tagging your blog on Technorati was considered an essential step in getting started with a blog. I'm not so sure that's the case anymore.

Technorati offers a clear standard of authority and you can download the OPML file of the top 10 blogs in any category. Why only 10? I have no idea.

Cons:

After years of spotty service, seemingly random redesigns that made the site even worse than it was before, a crazy idea to get bloggers to point all their rel=tag links to Technorati (!) and the entry of bigger players into blog search - Technorati doesn't feel as active today as it once did. There are probably a lot of top blogs in any niche that haven't added themselves to the directory.

The directory is also organized according to the tags applied to a blog by its own author, typically when the blog just gets started.

The user experience is not good at Technorati but it's good enough to still warrant a look in hunting for top niche blogs.

Del.icio.us

Pros:

We wrote about how to find top niche blogs using Del.icio.us in a post last month. At the simplest level, go to http://del.icio.us/tag/topic+blog.

There's a huge amount of data on Del.icio.us and it's a very dynamic community. There are also RSS feeds, user comments, information about the people (users) who have done the classifying and a lot of other helpful features. I've been using Del.icio.us to find top niche blogs a lot lately and it's served me fairly well, even if I have to eyeball the last few yards to an answer.

Cons:

Del.ico.us hasn't been evolving very quickly, at least the publicly available version of the service. There are a lot of obnoxious qualities to it, like the fact that you can't search for most popular items with multiple tags - there's no such page as http://del.icio.us/popular/topic+blog.

Search results pages are funky and tag/topic+blog just means that a URL has been saved at least once with both of those terms, not that any number of people used both terms at once. It's not intuitive to look up the tags given a URL much less an entire domain. Finally, at least in the tech sector a lot of hip cats are using Ma.gnolia now instead of Del.icio.us. It's a recommendation engine waiting, forever, to happen and I'm still heartbroken that it was acquired by Yahoo! instead of the Library of Congress.

StumbleUpon

Pros:

StumbleUpon has huge user numbers, very targeted interests and classifications, and an algorithm combined with human editorial judgment about the blogs in question.

Cons:

It's more "fun" than it is business, unless you're into SEO. There's no clear way to look at top sites in any category. The search results page is really random-looking; good for stopping by and doing some searches just to see if you've missed anything, but nothing you'd do as part of a structured search.

Google Reader Recommendations

Pros:

Google Reader's new recommendations are very high quality, in tech at least, because they have a large number of web savvy users. I'm hoping that starting a dedicated Google Reader account filled only with some known feeds in a niche, I can have other top sources in that same niche recommended to me.

Cons:
Recommendations don't come right away, you have to wait for awhile. There's also a limit to the number of recommendations you can receive at one time. It is a tech-focused community, disproportionately to the blogosphere in general. Finally, this is a pretty silly little hack at things and you find yourself getting tied up with trying to run multiple Google accounts, etc.

AideRSS

Pros:

I love AideRSS because the criteria for hotness is relatively clear and I find the service really useful in lots of contexts. In theory you can plug almost any RSS feed, including search feeds, into AideRSS and it will score items in that feed for popularity based on number of comments, Diggs, del.icio.us saves and inbound links. You could put feeds from a blog search for niche-specific language into RSS and find some niche hotness. Once you identify top niche blogs you can also run their feeds through AideRSS to quickly discover what their communities of readers find most engaging. It's magic, almost.

Cons:

The service only works most of the time and long URLs choke it up. It's also limited to feeds, which take some creative thinking in order to bend to our particular purpose of finding top blogs.

Ask.com Blogsearch

Pros:

Ask has the best blog search on the web. It uses Bloglines subscription numbers as a big weight in spam control. There's very little spam. You can search for niche-specific language or a key niche link and sort by popularity of source.

Cons:
Ask does get overloaded sometimes and the above method is hardly systematic anyway. I wouldn't rely on it alone. Ask Blogsearch does index a lot of funky feeds that clutter search results even if they aren't spam. Try it out and you'll see what I mean.

Conclusion

See what I mean? Nobody quite does what we need. Used in concert and with a little work, these tools together can build you a pretty good reading list of top blogs in any niche. There's big room for improvement in this toolset though.

What do you use for this kind of research? I'd love to know.