How to Use Blekko to Rock at Your Job

Last week my mother emailed me to ask if I knew the educational technology speaker visiting her school that day. I didn’t, but it took about 5 minutes to create an EdTech CSE and find what some of the most respected edtech bloggers online had said about the man. He and my mom ended up having lunch together and talking about the internet, which was pretty cool.

These on-the-fly CSEs are particularly well-suited to Blekko because anyone can then suggest revisions later. More importantly: it’s a social community where you may find that someone else has already built the engine you’re looking for and you can just grab it and go.

Quick Tips:

I’ve trained myself to see a list of anything and think CSE. If you’ve got, or want to create, folders in an RSS reader – it’s relatively simple to export your subscriptions, open the OPML file in a text editor, see how simple it is and delete all the subscriptions except for the topic folder in question. Resave it, then you can upload the new .OPML file into Blekko. That’s a very nice feature, OPML import.

The more you think in terms of URLs, the content they hold, the other URLs they are linked-to and the feeds that are associated with them – the more permutations for searching you can think of. The sky is the limit and it’s a very rational system.

Finally, CSEs plus RSS equals a key to any inner sanctum. RSS feeds have been my bread and butter since becoming a professional blogger, and they are really what captured my interest more than anything when I first discovered social media. When I was just getting started (ok, sometimes I still do this), I would take the RSS feed of one or more blogs I really admired and I’d run them through an RSS to Instant Messaging service. These days, my favorite is Notify.me.

I’d get an IM within minutes of any post going up on a blog I really admired, and if I could make a meaningful value-add to the conversation, I’d jump right over and be the first person to leave a comment on the post. I’d do that just often enough to get their attention but not often enough to be annoying. (But where do you find interesting things to add to the conversation? If only there was some way to quickly search for keywords and tidbits in the archives of a collection of topical experts in any field!)

I used to do a whole lot of hitch-hiking and developed the ability to listen and converse with just about anyone, regarding just about anything. Participating in blog conversations is a much safer way to do that.

So – let’s say you’ve got a good collection of topical expert blogs built up and you’ve got it put into Blekko so you can search against their archives. Guess what? Blekko offers RSS feeds for your search queries! That’s awesome.

Take what parts of this you will, but I’ll tell you what I’m going to do: I’m going to make sure that all the hundreds of geolocation experts who blog online know that I’m interested in geofencing and history because I’m going to subscribe to a feed for those two search terms in my big Blekko search engine of geolocation blogs. I’m going to read everything they write on the topic and I’ll probably leave a comment whenever I can do so appropriately. Thank you, Blekko.

Google Custom Search does not offer RSS feeds. It has to be given a cookie and told to roll over just to get it to try to show you something close to the most recent search results inside your collection.

What Does it Mean?

These are just the ways that I intend to use Blekko, based on my experience using Google Custom Search and the ways that the two services are different. Maybe you’ve got other strategies in mind.

But here’s how I see the three strategies above:

This is how I will assemble a magic reference book, a Dictionary, Encyclopedia and Atlas of the Past, Present and Future of…any topic I want.

This is how I will see a field, or a group of people and companies described online, and with a quick scrape be able to query deep into their online histories. Imagine looking at a set of people’s names online, using find and replace to build a set of Google Social Graph query URLs to discover their blogs, bookmarks, Twitter accounts and more, then putting those URLs into Blekko. If that works, that’s like 5 minutes of set-up to enable yourself to ask “who in this room has ever bookmarked or tweeted a web page about topics X, Y or Z?” Hello dreamy social search engine!

This is how I will hone in on conversations in the future, among any set of experts, on any topics of interest to me. That’s going to be very high signal and very low noise. That’s like pulling a sliver of knowledge from the future and putting it straight into your brain – then sliding down it to arrive exactly where the conversations emerge, so that you can participate in them.

Will Blekko Succeed?

Clearly, only the ten people still reading this article and I are ever going to do the above – and we’re going to have to click on a whole lot of ads to keep this puppy in business!

The rest of the world is unlikely to build Blekko-collections of their own because the cognitive overhead of curation is of a fundamentally different quantity and quality than the simpler requirements of consumption. People have compared Blekko to the recently launched Cuil because of the hype, but better comparisons could be made to the valiant but failed roll-your-own search engines like Rollyo, Swicki and Hittery. Not enough people with good intentions (not spammers) were willing to put the time in to use these tools well.

Blekko will attempt to compensate for this by automatically serving up search results from hand-curated custom search engines on big popular topics. That will help direct searchers to the Mayo Clinic’s webpage for “cure for the common cold” instead of Demand Media’s eHow page on the subject, which is of clear commercial intent and questionable worth if you ask the Blekko team. Mayo Clinic doesn’t have SEO people on staff, but Demand Media does, Blekko points out – so they built a health “slashtag” that includes Mayo’s site but excludes Demand sites. Health search queries are performed inside that slashtag by default.

Will that matter, though? Will millions of people rush with open arms into the unfamiliar, even if it’s clearly superior upon the slightest investigation? Will people choose what’s best for them? Will they choose what’s most powerful and beautiful, instead of that which is easy and must remind itself constantly to “Not be Evil?”

I would submit that if people were likely to make such choices, the world would be a very different place than it is today.

But in the meantime, fellow benevolent hackers, fellow dreamers of antiquity who find ourselves on the web, fellow fans of ballet, acupuncture and other romantic, unorthodox pursuits — when we find ourselves with a need to search, in a cruel and banal world, may we use tools like Blekko. May we use them to dive deep into the archival knowledge of the finest writers and thinkers in our respective fields. To survey quickly what any set of people online have said before. And to track what our most trusted sources say regarding any topic, anytime in the future.

Even if no one else understands. They don’t all need to understand, because in the hyper-linked, flash-curated, streaming social world of the future – those of us who know how to dance among the links and the fleeting, beautiful startups that overestimate most of humanity’s capacity for intellectual engagement before crumbling into craven ad networks just to keep the lights on – those of us who can do the power user’s dance in those circumstances will know that our positions are secure and that the web will be ours to create on. And we’ll treasure beautiful things like Blekko, whether the rest of the world does or not.

Discuss