Talk Digger revamped
Talk Digger has revamped its service, and what a great job…I was about to go to Feed Digest and make a spliced ego feed from the various blog engines, where I could wipe the duplicates, but now I can do this at Talk Digger as this is its speciality…generate them in one easy go, and see the results, plus you can exclude links from your own domain…wow!
Here is the prime directive of Talk Digger:
“It is simple. You have in hand the URL of a piece of news of the BBC, a blog post, a product page, or any other web page, and you want to know who is talking about it, you want to know what people have to say about it. You copy that URL, paste it in the Talk Digger search box and press Dig it!
Talk Digger will then return results from various search engines. All the results returned contain a link to the URL. This is what we call a conversation: a multitude of people, all over the Internet, linking to a specific URL. The following schema describe what a conversation found by Talk Digger is. “
Features:
- You can choose to include up to 9 search engines, 6 of these are blog engines (BlogPulse is missing)
- Results are sorted by engine (10-20 results per engine)
- PageRank for each result (see if the site linking to you is popular)
- Sort by recent entries or PageRank
- Each result can be opened in a new window or previewed right where you are, and total incoming links for your whole blog from that search engine is shown
- Not only can you remove duplicates, you can exclude results from your own domain…now this is awesome (I think Feedster is the only engine that excludes results from a URL…only it is not combined with the link search)
I really think this is a winning feature.
So at last a way you can generate an RSS feed from Bloglines citations
My other option was to make an ego feed at MySyndicaat, but it doesn’t do link searches, you could maybe exclude results from your own domain with the boolean function, and it does away with duplicates…so it seems Talk Digger is a focused tool that provides a unique service.
[ADDED 30/12/05: What I mean is that MySyndicaat doesn’t do link searches internally from its Content Type menu, obviously you can do a link search (ego search) at the native engine and paste the feed address into MySyndicaat…maybe they can offer link search in the Advanced boolean section].
Here’s where to get a handy bookmarklet for an instant meta-popularity view…and keyboard navigation…implement it on your blog posts.
I wonder if you could say I only want to see incoming links from websites that have a PageRank of 5 or above, I suppose if you sort by PageRank you can just stop reading once it starts dropping.
See Fredericks post, very keen interest in blog conversations.
Related post:
Blog/RSS engines: Incoming links comparison
(Next I wonder if we can skip results in blogrolls, and results in blog posts that are re-published del.icio.us links)
(What about to limit incoming links from an OPML file, instead of the whole blogosphere)
More interesting stuff:
Weblog Conversations…more
A Model for Weblog Research…more
What is a Topic?…more














Hi John,
It is the most complete review of Talk Digger I got. It is really appreciated. In fact, it is posts such at that one that keep me working on Talk Digger.
Thanks and keep up the good work with library Clips,
Salutations,
Fred
Comment by Fred — December 29, 2005 @ 5:05 pm
Hi John,
It is just to let you know about a new feature I just released for the new year:
New Talk Digger feature: Regional view of results
I hope you will like it.
Happy New Year!
Salutations,
Fred
Comment by Fred — December 31, 2005 @ 9:38 pm
I’m off to give it a try right now.. might mean I can get rid of all those multiple Pubsub/Technorati/Feedster feeds
Of course, bear in mind you can then throw that feed into FeedDigest for all sorts of republishing fun
Comment by Peter Cooper — January 1, 2006 @ 6:20 pm
I think they might need to promote that service a bit more. I had to tour around the site a bit to find it. Perhaps adding something to a regular search saying “Want this in RSS format?” or something..
Comment by Peter Cooper — January 1, 2006 @ 6:23 pm