An interesting Microsoft-related development today for the weblogging community: MSN Blogbot. It's essentially a tool for searching weblogs, set to debut later this year. MSN exec Yusuf Mehdi showed it briefly on screen during a conference on the Redmond campus today, along with MSN Newsbot, a news search engine also in development.Mehdi was pressed for time and moved on quickly, so he didn't share many details about Blogbot. It's not yet clear, for example, if it will be based on RSS feeds ... Seattle Post Intelligencer
See also Yahoo! News:
Microsoft is claiming a first with MSN Blogbot, a service that will let users search Web logs, or "blogs," personal-journal type Web pages that have become increasingly popular. Many consumers even use blogs as a news source, according to Microsoft. MSN Blogbot will aggregate content from hundreds of thousands of Web logs and index that content based on which Web logs are most popular and credible, Redetzki said. The service should go into beta soon, and Microsoft plans to introduce MSN Blogbot worldwide, she said. Microsoft has made Internet search a key investment area and is building its own search engine from scratch. The company's current search services on the MSN Web site are offered through a partnership with Yahoo. "Microsoft excels at software issues, and to build a search engine from scratch is a software issue. This is a perfect opportunity for Microsoft to take on this software challenge head on," Redetzki says. MSN Newsbot will be the first of the new services to officially launch. It will be followed by MSN Blogbot and the general search service based on the newly developed Microsoft search technology, Redetzki says.
Also, Dave Winer.
