Instructions here! Very nice tutorial, implemented in about 15 minutes.

Check out Commentor (http://rtur.net/blog/post/2009/02/16/Commentor-e28093-new-version.aspx), an extension to help BlogEngine.net deal with the flood of comment spam that usually appears after one enables commenting for a site.

Check out the link ("The Sorry State of Blog Search Engines") from the Agency Wire site.

I found myself agreeing with much of what the author stated ... that is, blog search simply isn't that good. There is opportunity for some company to improve upon this, but thus far, no company has distinguished themselves. I have hopes for Twingly, and of course Google could always surprise us ... but I just want a search engine that indexes the content, offers me multiple methods of finding AND analyzing said content. Simple!

Twingly, a courageous challenger to Google and others in the blog search area, recently announced some new features and happenings for their service.

• Twingly Blog Rank - Basically, page rank for blogs, primarily using inlinks and other criteria to measure the popularity of blogs. You can check your own Blog Rank by logging into Twingly and viewing your profile. They also have built a widget that you can use to show the world how your blog ranks (See: http://www.twingly.com/blogs/profile?url=blog.twingly.com for an example).
• Twingly now has a top 100 list for blogs (we're not in it! <G>) ... see: http://www.twingly.com/top100 for the list.
• Finall, check out Twingly's partner list (http://www.twingly.com/partners); hopefully they'll be able to get more U.S. companies to jump aboard ... I really would like for them to have success, if only to push Google to improve their search tools at a faster clip.

And media monitoring/reputation management may want to consider some of Twingly's enterprise solutions ... see http://www.twingly.com/enterprise for more info.

 

BlogCatalog recently launched a new blog / social search engine; view it at: (http://www.blogcatalog.com/search).

The search pulls results from BlogCatalog's directory, blog postings, discussions, blog tags, post tags, and social search. The search results are well organized, and retrieve relevant postings. I'm not sure about the breadth of this search engine, and will have to do additional testing to review this resource.  

Read about "The State of the BlogSphere 2008", a report compiled by Technorati at: http://www.technorati.com/blogging/state-of-the-blogosphere/ .