Some Insight into Blogdigger and Ice Rocket

After posting about Yahoo's RSS search test site earlier today, I got an e-mail from Greg Gershman, who runs Blogdigger. Here's the scoop: the company is based in Baltimore and has two part-time employees, including Gershman, who has a full-time job as a software developer. If you're a VC looking to invest in the blog/RSS search space, you should send Greg an e-mail or give him a call. Some start-up capital, he said, would let Blogdigger hire people to do business development. In terms of Blogdigger's search methodology, which I think produces superior better results than Technorati, Gershman said two techniques are used: predictive algorithms that spider blogs based on their historial behaviour; and pinging tools such as Pingomatic. A problem with pings, he said, is they have been embraced by spammers.
I also got some feedback from Ice Rocket's Blake Rhodes, who has a habit of sending nice notes to people who mention Ice Rocket in their blogs. Rhodes confirmed that Mark Cuban is an investor, which explains why Cuban refers to Ice Rocket as “we” these days. Rhodes said Ice Rocket's searches for blog content primarily by date to keep the data as fresh as possible. The company is also working on a tool that will look at how many links each site has, and then rank them by importance – which should be an interesting concept.