Blogdimension Blog

As you now, we have recently been under a fierce attack from a blogger who accused us to “steal” his content. The whole story is available in our previous post and also on this blogger’s blog (I let you find which blog it is by yourself).

Beyond the fact that we - a search engine whose primary mission and value proposition like any other retrieval system is to index Internet content and make it searchable by Internet users and available to them - were treated publicly like the worst criminals on earth by this blogger this case raises a real ontological question:

Are we going toward the emergence of a private Internet?

We feel there is a real absurd situation where a new breed of bloggers in the name of the right for privacy want AT THE SAME TIME

- to publish their content on the World “Wild” Web which is not really the right place for those who look for privacy,

- to have a great readership, gain a maximum audience and have many comments on their posts,

- and eventually not to be found via RSS search engines, aggregators or Digg-likes and their content being duplicated!

We are also bloggers so we now what we are talking about. Normally, when a blogger decides to publish some content on Internet he/she expects (even prays for it!) his/her content will be visible by other Internet users. So, a community forms around his/her blog with interactive exchanges, new real or virtual friendships and even some fame for the most talented ones, etc.

Myself, as a blogger, I am pretty happy to see my blog content duplicated somewhere because it gives me a greater chance to get additional readers that I otherwise would never get. Very often when I find an interesting content on a Digg-like, I tend to visit the original blog to navigate in the beautiful environment set by the blogger. Usually, on search engines and Digg-likes, there is a link just below the cached content (”duplicated” content if you prefer) which allows the readers to jump directly to the original blog. A search engine does just offer the possibility to FIND a content, reading it is an other activity of the user experience. It is far more pleasant to read a blog post on the blog itself (because of all the design features and multimedia elements proposed by the blogger) rather than the raw text of the cached content displayed on a search engine! So, we urge on the users to search for content and find it in search engines then to switch naturally to the original blog to read it in its original environment!
Search engines need to cache Internet content in order to make themselves visible on Internet and other search engines but also to make the blogs indexed and their authors visible as well and help them to get readers and the necessary audience. Without the role of the search engines, the vast majority of blogs would be perfectly unknown and would never get a single comment! They would stay in the gloomy waters of Internet! We will soon explain in details the role of “caching”.

But the problem is not to try to explain or convince the bloggers about the benefits of search engines. Most of them know the value and purpose of retrieval tools.

No, the point is that a bunch of bloggers, as written above, would like to make their content private while they are publishing it on the Internet medium. It resembles an oxymoron! But this is a real trend and more and more bloggers are starting to complain, sometimes very aggressively.

The purpose of this post is to try to find a honorable solution for everybody: 1) the Internet search systems, 2) the bloggers, 3) both parties

1) Recommendations and guidelines for the attention of retrieval tools (to us and our peers, in fact):
NB: this is the lesson we learnt from our recent issue with the blogger. In a way, the experience was useful. It is a pity this blogger was so aggressive and not open minded to discussion or patient.

• Try to cache only excerpts of an original content and not the whole content. A number of characters should be set as a standard, like -mere example - 600 characters,
• Accept all META instructions like nocache, noarchive, nofollow, etc. (we are currently fixing this for the next release of our service),
• Offer a blogger the possibility to get his URLs removed as quickly as possible through a dedicated “contact form”.

2) Recommendations and gudelines for the attention of the bloggers who want their content not to be searchable or found via retrieval tools
NB: the ones who want their online content stay private or confidential.

• Use the META instructions cited just above in 1),
• Either protect their blogs or some of their posts by a password (Wordpress offers this possibility, as an example),
• Customize their feeds so they deliver only excerpts (See Wordpress guidelines related to the “excerpts” and RSS management),
• Avoid to use the “open” Internet if you do not want your content be visible or duplicated! Web 2.0 and RSS are not books! Internet content is easily disseminated. By anybody, not only Internet tools.

3) Recommendations for both 1) and 2)

• Favor diplomatic ways of communication between the bloggers and the retrieval tools prior adopting unfriendly attitudes like sueing legally, bashing publicly or other threats. These are all very sad things we exeperienced recently,
• Imagine a multilevel formalized process. For example,

1) Blogger sends a message to the service and asks the content be removed ASAP and at least within a period of 2/3 working days (the removal process can be technically long because the service needs to refresh the database after the removal. This process can take up to 48 hours.) ,

2) If no action is taken after the first step or no response provided by the service, the blogger sends a second message with a firmer demand and a deadline (copy of the message to a lawyer can be an option),

3) With no response at all a blogger can then try to take action. But here again, it will work in some cases but probably not in others (big companies have good lawyers and are slow to react to a user demand and smaller companies can be also slow to react because their team is limited). Not to mention some services are located overseas!

This post is meant to share some reflections about this issue which will probably tend to be on the agenda with time. We do not propose here a real solution but only an insight. Our goal is to make bloggers and services talk together and set the rules together.

And you what is your opinion. What are your ideas?

We are often asked by the media and journalists what makes Blogdimension a different search engine. We, at “BD”, usually reply basically we focus on “Web 2.0″ content.

But we find it quite uneasy to explain about our positioning because the Internet content we give access to our users has no clear definition yet.

Q: What is then this still undefined Web content you call “Web 2.0 content”?

A: the type of content BD gives access to is characterized at least by one or several of the following aspects:

1) Real time and live web

• “Live web“: it means content that has a limited lifespan. It consists of RSS or Atom-like content which we could define as “As soon published, as soon consumed, as soon scrapped“. Typically it includes all the blogs, microblogs, forums, online news, podcasts, online videos… NB: our frenemies - from Technorati - also mention the idea of a “live web”.

• “Real time“: next step is to introduce the idea of a real time content. It is not so difficult to implement. The only limitation is technical resources (servers) because this process requires much computation and storage capacity.

2) Tags

• There is quite a big difference between Web 1 and Web 2. Previously, a content used to be classified not by the author but on the search engine side when it was indexed. Categories and topics were fixed and defined statically by the webmasters. Today, the author has an active role in sorting out the content by associating descriptive tags. Categories and topics are changing constantly. This new possibility makes now the web really live! One can notice this new phenomenon in tag clouds which are virtually booming on the blogosphere.

3) Opinion and subjectivity

• This kind of content has the peculiarity of aggregating users’ comments and viewpoints. That means something distinctive from general, informative, encyclopedic or commercial web. Of course, the latter can also include some opinion (personal comments, critics, etc.). In this case they fully enter into Blogdimension’s scope.

4) Multimedia

• In recent years, the web is going through an increasing amount of multimedia content. The success of online audio and video sharing services speak for themselves. Just carry out a basic search and you will consistently find a bunch of YouTube or Blogdimension video files and tons of podcasts from blogs or other online media mixed in the results.

Q: So, finally, what is Blogdimension’s contribution to the Internet search industry?

A: Blogdimension allows the user to search via a single entry-point mainly for:

• live,
• opinion,
• multimedia,
• and commented upon

web content.

At the end of the day, the question is: how to clearly define this new kind of web content?

We will definitely have to imagine a new concept. We at Blogdimension suggest “opinion web” or “popular web” because “Web 2.0” appears to be a rather technical definition. “User Generated Web” could also be an option for defining the New Web.

And, you? What is your opinion?

Thanks for your support.

The Team

Five! Five is the number of international languages already available for searching into the vast Web 2.0 dimension with Blogdimension.com!

The Japanese version of Blogdimension.com - the Web 2.0 Search Engine - allows Japanese speaking users to search for contents in their own language. Be they Japanese natives, students, business people or simply lovers of the great Japanese tongue and culture.

They can now find easily all kind of Japanese Web 2.0 sources ie. blogs, microblogs (Twitter, Tumblr, Jaiku…), forums, online news, images, audio files & podcasts, online videos…

All these contents can now be searched directly from a Japanese interface within Blogdimension.com.

No need to mention that the Japanese language is one among the first blogging languages. Sometimes even the first one (see David Sifry’s analysis).

Blogdimension has been accumulating tons of Japanese Web 2.0 sources since last summer’s relaunch. It was logical to offer Japanese users a way to search for all these contents.

So, dear Japanese users, should you find any interesting Web 2.0 link, a blog, or whatever containing a RSS or Atom feed, please do submit it so you help us to increase the index of Japanese sources.

We wish you a pleasant journey in Blogdimension Japan and of course a lot of fun in your Web 2.0 search experience.

笑い Warai!

Thanks for your support and special thanks to all our Japanese friends (A, Y & O) who helped us with passion there in Japan

The Team

PS: Strangely, “www” (short for “warai-warai-warai”) means “lol” in Japanese, as if the Web is finally a place associated with fun and laughing.

The history of Internet led us through roughly 6 different stages reflected by the contents found in the World Wide Web:

• 1993-1995: most of the content to be found in the Web was from universitarian and scientific origin,
• 1995-1997: then came the era of personal webpages indexed by the first portals and search engines,
• 1997-1999: corporate websites and webmerchants started to flourish,
• 1999-2001: press media went totally online. Other media (TV, radio) were condemned to stay off-line because of the weakness of the bandwidth!

Then came a technological leap: broadband…

• 2001-2006: during this period the Web became suddenly richer (rich media) and more participative allowing multimedia files to be delivered and exchanged online. Blogs appeared, MP3 music systems like Napster paved the way with Peer-to-Peer systems. Immediately followed by video online sharing systems and voice over the net. The Web 2.0 was born making it possible for everyone to become a consumer and a producer of the content.
• 2007: this date is crucial since it marks the upcoming of virtual life and mobile and Internet convergence.

Gigantic and incumbent search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN due to their longevity encompassed all these periods and therefore succeeded in indexing all kind of contents in their databases.

This enormous accumulation of content by the leading search systems during the web evolution can be considered as an asset in regard with the vast choice of sources offered to the users.

But it is not really! Historical search systems are overwhelmed by too much “noise” content making it difficult to find straightforward relevant content. Their links databases are spoiled with too many obsolete and commercial content making it hard to bring satisfaction to the users.

Moreover, the fact that their ranking models are all based on popularity (sometimes dubbed as “authority”) makes their indices not very dynamical. Popular web sources are almost on top and new sources have to struggle in order to get to the the first results pages.

It is not a lie to say that if the users use only one search engine they miss much of the reality of today’s web.

Things must now change as the users become more aware! The users should consider specializing their search operations.

To do this, a new generation of search engines is emerging on the market. These niche search engines are the “alternative search engines”.

Each alternative system has its own speciality and positionning. Some are dedicated to the retrieval of images, other to blogs, still others to given topics and type of content. Some of them carry out this task in an extremely creative way thanks to smart interfaces enhanced by the Ajax language. Some are real AI tools.

If you wish to discover all the richness of the alternative search engines, we invite you to read the excellent www.altsearchengines.com, a blog from the ReadWriteWeb network specially dedicated to these new generation search engines. This blog is thoroughly animated and sourced by Charles Knight who scans the whole Internet on a daily basis to find and present new alternative search engines.

www.blogdimension.com also belongs to this breed of alternative search engines. It proposes a totally new way of addressing the usage of online search activities.

Blogdimension focuses exclusively on Web 2.0 content like blogs, microblogs, forums, online media, images derived from these sources, audio files & podcasts, videos. Generally speaking, Blogdimension retrieves syndicated (RSS) and user generated content only. In the contrary of all the big ones, Blogdimension.com does not give access to any general, encyclopedic or commercial web eventhough one can find such content also in our search engine incidentally.

By such a positionning, Blogdimension appears as a complementary tool to the incumbent search engines represented by the trio Google-Yahoo-MSN (Live.com). Blogdimension exists in English, French, Spanish, Chinese and soon in Japanese, Portuguese and Russian. Other great languages are in progress.

Said in a different way, Blogdimension gives access to the subjective part of the web. To the web made of opinions and viewpoints (blogs, forums, videos). This viral and unconventional part of the web which expresses individual thoughts, anger and passion. In other words the free web!

It is time to use several search engines to discover the still new unexplored dimensions of the World Wide Web!

Great moment for Blogdimension.com, the Web 2.0 Search Engine! We are proud to announce the launch of Blogdimension.com in Chinese.

It is not conceivable to ignore such a great language and civilization even for a search company. Today Chinese (Mandarin) is among the most spoken languages in the World. Tomorrow it will be the first language of Internet.

So, after English, French and Spanish versions, Blogdimension releases now the Chinese version of its search engine oriented primarily on Web 2.0, RSS and multimedia content.

Chinese users can now find blogs, forums, news feeds, images, audio & podcast and of course online videos like “6.cn” in Chinese.

All this was possible thanks to Gao and Suying whose knowledge of the Chinese languages, culture and Web 2.0 context were crucial for this project.

Why a Chinese version for Blogdimension ?

China has its own search systems like Baidu, Bookee, Zhuaxia, Qikoo, Booso, etc. which are excellent, effective and adapted tools for Chinese users.

Blogdimension’s aim, we insist on it, is not to appear as competitors to the Chinese search systems. In the contrary, Blogdimension is a complementary and additional tool not only for the Chinese users living in mainland China but for all Chinese speaking people included non-Chinese people learning the language.

It means that Blogdimension’s Chinese version brings also value to the Chinese speaking users living overseas in South Eastern Asia, the United States, Europe and any other part where Chinese communities are present and active.

We believe Blogdimension being an international initiative it gives Chinese users the capacity to form a huge lingusitic community (metacommunity) all over the world by gathering in a single entry point all kind of Web 2.0, multimedia and blogospheric content written or published in the Chinese language. It helps the Chinese - be they from inside or outside China - to find information in their language, share viewpoints or cultural codes and stay interconnected independently from any geographic limit. We think language is as important as geography. China is often dubbed as “Middle Country” or “Middle Kingdom” in history books. We would be happy that thanks to Blogdimension China could be dubbed also as the “Extended Country”.

Blogdimension delivers no political messages. It is aimed only at facilitating the access to the Web 2.0 content existing in the various languages it operates.

Blogdimension’s goal is definitely to bring Web 2.0 and blogosphere content to a maximum of people all around the world, whatever country they live, in their language. There are no small languages in our conception. Every language in the world is as important as English, Spanish or French, especially in a world that tends to be more and more multilateral.

So we ask the Chinese users to be patient because our index of Chinese links is not as big as it deserves to be and in regard of the Chinese influence in the world. It will take some time before our Chinese index builds up! So if you are a Chinese speaking user and you don’t find a source in Blogdimension, please just submit it! And be confident.

Dear Chinese users, thanks for your support and contribution.

The Team

Blogdimension’s statistics record the search activities of two kind of users at that stage: English speaking and French speaking.

Latest statistics (end of August 2007) show that the French speaking users account for 71% of the total audience whereas the English speaking ones account for 29%. So French speaking users are 2.45 times more numerous than the English speaking ones (it’s not totally exact we should say queries in French speaking or English speaking sections of Blogdimension).

The search of text-based contents (blogs, forums, news feeds) by French speaking users account for 60% of all Blogdimension’s queries. This same kind of search by English speaking users account for 20% of the total queries. If the English speaking users were as numerous as the French speaking ones, the text-based searches would be 19% less for the English speaking users than for the French speaking ones.

Now the search for images by French speaking users accounts for 7% of all the queries. This figure is 3% for the English speaking users. If the French speaking and English speaking audiences were at the same level the number of image searches would be roughly the same for both origins of users.

The search for audio and podcasts by French speaking users accounts for 1,5% of the total queries and 4% for the English speaking users. If the audiences were the same the audio & podcast searches would be by 6.3 times superior for the English speaking users!

The search of online videos by French speaking users accounts for 2.3% of the total queries. This kind of search the English speaking users accounts for 1.55%. We see that English speaking users carry out 1.36 more video searches than the French speaking ones if the audiences were the same!

These figures are self-speaking! On the basis of our statistics the English speaking users have a multimedia activity on a search engine by far more intense than the French speaking ones who tend rather to search for text-based contents.

It is clear that focusing only on text-based search would not be a good option for Blogdimension especially in the scope of an international development strategy.

Blogdimension’s choice to position itself as a multimedia search engine favouring the search for rich content media (images, audios & podcasts and online videos) corresponds to a pertinent strategy!

So let’s head toward the idea of a “multimedia search engine”!

Thanks for your support!

The Team

There are loads of search engines throughout the world.

Some of them are general. They retrieve links to all kind of contents in the results page.

Others are specialized (or “vertical”). They focus only on one topic, area or given type of resource or file. And fewer say of themselves they are universal! We let you the pleasure to sort them into this or that category…

Nevertheless, true “multimedia” search engines are not that common!

Blogdimension is one of these rare multimedia search engines. It enables - within the same simple interface and for a given keyword or sequence of keywords - to search at the same level for links pointing to:

- contents extracted from the blogosphere (blogs, microblogs like Twitter, Tumblr, etc.),
- contents related to online news feeds,
- contents that one can find in some forums or bulletin board systems,
- images corresponding or related to the keyword,
- audio files, cool music, sounds but also links to great podcasts (For example: CNN, BBC, CBS, NBC, NYTimes, etc.),
- online videos. Not only YouTube or Dailymotion but also links from emergent video sharing systems like Blip.tv, Revver or the Chinese 6.cn or 6rooms.cn…

We are definitely talking about multimedia search on Internet with Blogdimension.com. Blogdimension is the search engine focused exclusively on the new wants and needs of the Internet users. Today the mind of the Internet users and bloggers is not compartmentalized! A user does not look for just one type of Internet resource like he or she would live in a one-dimensional world. In the contrary, the user will scrutinize all the dimensions and facets of a targeted resource.

For example, during a product search process he or she will appreciate to find at the same time:

- the technical description or the “objective” features of the product,
- other users’ opinion (bloggers’ advice, for example),
- online medias’ comments,
- images related to the product,
- audio or podcasts broadcasted by specialized online medias,
- videos about the product be they viral, promotional, demos or even humouristic…

It is the same approach whatever the kind of search: a product, a piece of information or… a person!

Blogdimension.com is the new generation search engine that dedicates itself specifically to the users’ multimedia needs.

Blogdimension is available in English, French, shortly in Spanish and soon in two great and inescapable languages

Thanks for your support!

The team

Blogdimension.com was released at the end of 2005 first in French because its authors originate from France, and also the French blogging community was the second after the English speaking one.

Blogdimension goes on international! We are proud to announce Blogdimension.com - the new generation search engine - for English speaking users.

Today one has to be global! Global means proposing a range of services that reach a maximum of users. Therefore, Blogdimension will also propose soon interfaces and contents not only in French or English but also in other major languages of the blogging world: Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, etc.

Our aim is to be understood and used by everyone in the world.

So what is Blogdimension.com?

It’s basically a search engine that retrieves contents exclusively from dynamic web pages. By “dynamic” we mean:

- blogs,
- micro-blogging (Twitter-like),
- forums,
- newsfeeds,
- in one word, from syndicated websites.

Blogdimension does not retrieve information from the standard web. We therefore differentiate from other incumbent search engines.

What is Blogdimension’s value proposition?

Blogdimension retrieves all kind of blog-like and multimedia contents within an “all-in-one” unified entry point. These contents are mainly Consumer Based Contents:

- texts,
- online videos (YouTube, Dailymotion, other video sites to come),
- audio, podcasts (MP3),
- images,

found in blogs, forums, newsfeeds, social networks (some of them).

Soon, the users will have the possibility to search for other kind of contents.

How is Blogdimension different?

First of all, Blogdimension brings a solution to all those users that search text and multimedia contents at the same time by offering them a single entry point.
No need to browse many hidden links to find first the info search module, then the video search module in an other corner of the site, then again the audio search module!
We think that the user’s time is precious, so we facilitate him/her the access to the needed information by providing a unique coherent and straightforward interface to search texts and all kind of “Web 2.0″ contents at the same level.

Secondly, Blogdimension allows site submission! Do you own a blog, a forum or a RSS-like site? You can submit it to Blogdimension.com for a faster indexing. The only limitation is that the submitted resource is a syndicated one (RSS, Atom, etc.) and that the contents does not violate national or other applicable law.

Although Blogdimension features only two languages French and English for now, our search engine already supports 20 languages. The number of the resources in these languages will grow in time along with the enhancement of Blogdimension’s technical capacity.

Moreover, you can also search resources by their geographic location (ie. by country)!

The results and ranking formulas are completely different from those proposed by other search engines! We do not base our ranking on “popularity” or “authority” (it will come later as a mere option). In Blogdimension, the “freshest” results are displayed first. The more a result is recent, the more it appears on top of the results page. But the user has the choice to rearrange his results page by date, relevance or a mix of both relevance+date. Other sorting options will be available soon. We therefore base our ranking on the time criteria so every resource (for example blogs) have equal chances to appear on top of a results page. We introduce the concept on “fertility”: the more a blogger publishes, the more he/she will is likely to be ranked on the top of the list! So, in Blogdimension.com, every blogger has the chance to be one day “top ranked”.

The users can subscribe to a set of keywords making it possible to follow them up in a reader and see what’s new on the Internet!

There’s no commercial results mixed within the organic results. No trusted feeds at Blogdimension’s! You find only informative results. If one day we should introduce commercial results, it will be in a specific search module.

And many more functions and features still in preparation. So, just use Blogdimension.com regularly and check how it evolves!

What is Blogdimension’s philosophy?

As bloggers, we noticed that the existing giant search engines do not necessarily provide a pertinent answer to the new Web 2.0-like usage of the Web. With the rise of the blogs, the explosion of consumer generated contents (CGC) and an Internet becoming more and more multimedia, we feel that classical search engines become too complex to use in everyday life.

So Blogdimension positions itself as the alternative search engine to those who want a quick and unified access to the information comprised in blog-like contents as listed above. In a certain way, Blogdimension is oriented on a Web 2.0 kind of usage.

Our ambition is to adapt to these new ways of searching the Internet by proposing the right and convivial tools to the users to face the growing complexity and inflation of the Internet.

After focusing on the Internet content search, it’s now time to focus on the relationship between the different contents and their providers (the bloggers, for example).

Now, with Blogdimension, you have a real choice, an effective alternative to the gigantic search engines and finally more freedom by using a wider spectrum of Internet search engines.

Thank you for your support.