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Internet Weightlifting
Our search for good weightlifting blogs hit gold when we used Technorati's blog finder. Once we found one legitimate good blog, that blog led us to many others. In essence, we used that blogger's knowledge of what was good and bad as a guide for avoiding SPAM.
Sections: Business
Topics: google search technorati weblogs
I've been working on a little project with a friend to try to figure out what legitimate weight training resources there are on the Internet. Most specifically, we are looking for weightlifting blogs and sources of practitioner knowledge.
We're doing this because weight training is a sport that is sparsely practiced, making it hard to find good information. Further, the information that is available is a mix of oral tradition and science. In such a situation, a good approach is to look for many sources of information to see what are the general practices and different people's reviews of what works and what not. Blogs would seem like a natural place to look.
Our search was instructive because it shows, even with a good knowledge of search technology, how hard it is to get to find non-spam content when information is relatively scarce and disorganized. The key seems to have been finding one good source of information and then following his links to discover a whole knowledge network.
Our first stop was via a Google blog search on strength training. That search most notably produced several SPAM blogs even among the recommended blogs at the top of the results. Even looking through the results 4 and 5 pages back produced little of real interest. All just people trying to sell you their advice or supplements; no one giving a real first hand account of best practices.
A search on technorati for strength training also produced many SPAM posts. However a search for bodybuilding produced a very useful blog tagged as bodybuilding. The blog actually seems to belong to a budding powerlifter (someone who trains to lift as much as possible in competitions). This person recounts his personal experience and references other legitimate resources. His blog is serving as a good starting point in our search.
Blog tagging is a relatively new feature on technorati. I suspect it worked here, because tagging a blog and registering it is costly relative to writing and tagging a blog post. The differentlial makes it much less likely that SPAMMERs will tag blogs. They tend to take the easy way out.
The other interesting thing to note is that we would have gotten nowhere had we just followed trusted sources that we already knew. None of these sources references blogs. We needed to find new sources that could lead to new things. We were trying to find legitimate SPAM-free information networks, not social networks.
Clearly, we have a lot left to do, but this was instructive.
Bud posted this on November 5, 2005
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Comments
Why thank you for your nice comments on my little blog :).
It's funny, using technorati I could also track back to your site using the 'who links to me function'.
Posted by: steph at November 6, 2005 07:23 PM
