Thing 9. AKA When does tea really mean cheese?

Cheese shop (3)
Originally uploaded by cathou_cathare

Well, I must say this exercise left me a bit cold. I explored each of the 3 sites searching for gardening, tea, and otters. I did not like Syndic8 at all - so text-y, and many, many blogs completely unrelated to my topic searches. No gold there. I liked the interface of Technorati a bit better, although I'm not sure I can say I was much happier with the search results.

Which brings me to the title for today's post. I searched for "tea" on Technorati, and was unhappy with the results list. So I clicked on one of their suggested related tags, which was "brewing." Lo and behold, one of the results was The Cheese Underground, whose main content is neither about tea nor brewing but artisanal cheese-making in Wisconsin. Not at all what I was looking for, but just happens to be another one of my favorite things, so I added the feed. By the way, this photo looks a little bit like heaven to me.

I didn't have too much more luck on Topix. I had been frustrated on another tool (can't remember now whether it was Syndic8 or Technorati - running together in my head now) when I searched for "gardening" and then clicked on a given related tag of "vegetables," only to get a results list that included a blog on how to influence the gender of your baby. Then, in my wandering on Topix, I saw another news item about research that suggests the mother's diet may have an effect on baby gender. Still not what I was looking for, but some trivia none the less.

Since Technorati had at least brought me entree in to the hidden gem of the Cheese Underground, I explored some more and found that I like their Advanced Search a lot better. You can put more terms in your search, exclude others, and search for "Blogs About" your search term rather than just posts. When you get your results list, you can look at related posts or related blogs, which was really what I was after. I ended up with a gardening blog, 2 tea blogs, and another cheese blog for which I'll add feeds.

So, I think I must improve my skills before I benefit from these tools as guided resourcs, but I did get some fun results from the wandering path. A fun exploration if you have some spare time!