Page 292 -

Knowledge Management Tools 275

cally any topic. These are often self-fi lmed and self-indexed. It is possible to search
the YouTube web site for a clip on a particular topic. While many videos are mostly
entertaining, quite a few serve as educational resources (see listings in chapter 14).
Pikas (2004) added the notion of searching to blogs. Blogs are reverse chronologi-
cally arranged collections of articles or stories that are generally updated more
frequently than regular web pages. Just like any other information on the net, there
is no guarantee of authority, accuracy, or lack of bias. In fact, personal blogs are
frequently biased and can be good sources of opinion and information from the man
on the street. Because blogs can be updated on the fl y, they frequently have unfi ltered
information faster from war zones and sites of natural disasters than the mainstream
media outlets. Blogs are also good sources of unfi ltered information on either faulty
or very useful products.
In the beginning, blogs appeared in search results alongside regular web pages.
Since blogs are not technologically any different from other web pages (i.e., they are
HTML, XML, JavaScript, etc., and it is their format, not their coding, that is different.),
spiders and bots collect posts the same way they collect other online information.
Search engines that place greater value on sites that are recently and frequently
updated and are highly linked tend to rank blog posts very highly. Since the barrier
to publication is so low in blogs, arguably much lower than for standard web pages,
these high rankings were introducing a lot of noise into online searches. Odds are that
you have run across several archived blog posts if you have searched on a controversial
topic in the past year. Recently, most major search engines have altered their
algorithms to push blogs down in the search results. Engines that only return two
results from any one site use this feature to limit the impact of blogs on the search
results.
Blog searching breaks down into at least two categories: information from within
blogs/across blogs or addresses of feeds from blogs so that you may subscribe in your
aggregator. Feeds and blogs are two different things, but are closely linked because
most blogs have feeds and many feeds are generated by blogs. Just as in other web
search tools, there are search engines and directories. At this time, blog search engines
are where general search engines were before the Google Age. There are many compet-
ing smaller products but no outstanding products dominating the scene.

Mashups
A mashup is an innovative way of combining content ( Merrill 2006 ). Mashups are
web applications that offer an easy and rapid way of combining two or more differ-
ence sources of content into a single seamlessly integrated application. The term
originates from the practice of mixing tracks from two different songs. One of the fi rst