Everyone's talking, but who is listening?

This seems to be the essential issue concerning using blogs on the Internet - heck, just using the Internet at all: there's a lot of good information out there, but you gotta find it. That's what's really behind this slew of technologies like Spurl, Delicious (I'm sorry, adding the periods in the middle hurts my brain right now), Pub Sub, Technorati, etc.

So for the beginners: I know this is said everywhere, but it bears repeating - use Technorati to do searches on the content of blogs. You can do this in a number of ways - go to the website and type in what you are looking for. Or click on the Technorati This link, and add (by dragging) the "favelet" to your browser bar. In this case at least, things work as clearly as they are described.

There's still some finessing to do, because if I type in "technology" and "arts" I'm not really finding much that is relevant - but I have a feeling the answer has something to do with "tags"....

The other idea about finding relevant content is finding out who is talking about you. I mean, if someone mentions my blog, then there's a chance I might be interested in their blog. In fact, I was planning on linking to Joe's aptly named blog a few days ago, but I got sidetracked, so he got the first link, because the same person who talked about me talked about him too. But I won't link that whole thread - since as Joe mentions, sometimes this "link to link to link" creates a torrid link love affair reminiscent of those vacation autoresponder wars that happen every major holiday....