How to Use Problems, Using Blogs and Wikipedia

To get ideas, how a problem could get solved or even to get  guidelines, how  to solve it,  blogs can be  an excellent information source.

Many engaged people are active on blogs and more than happy, to  help others with their know how, to solve  problems.

The main problem is, to find the right blogs, which is not always so easy, because there exist millions of them.

But for  that purpose search engines were developed,  which  search only in blogs;  but they search only in  the title of blogs  or at the title of posts in a blog.

Let us assume, that we want to solve a technical problem:

• the blog search engine Technorati is an excellent search engine.
• at first we open it at:  technorati  and we see, that there are about 37 000 blogs. It is of course almost impossible, to go through the total list and we must start, to use search terms.  The search field  is on the right side of the technorati logo at the top of  the website.
• now let's go  on with "proa", which we already used with  "YouTube".  No research result is shown, but a remark, that we shall refine our search.  It is almost unbelievable, that nobody should have mentioned  "proa" in so many blogs. Therefore lets start now with "sailing boat".  Only  3  posts are shown, what is quite peculiar. What is wrong ?  If we look at the search field, we see, that there are 2  search functions:   One for blogs and one for posts.  We had kept posts activated and now we will activate "Blogs" and repeat the search with "Sailing boat".  A list with many blogs about sailing boats is shown.

• we now repeat the search with "proa"   and indeed, we find 2 blogs:

        proa17ufrgs.blogspot.com
        proaufrgsb.blogspot.com

If we activate the shown web sites, then we see, that they are in Spanish and have nothing to do  with sailing boats.

Therefore we have to go back to use "sailing boats"   A list with 84 blogs are shown, which we can go through. But no blog shows up, which fits well.  So this search was not successful. We now could try other  search engines for blogs or we look at wikipedia, to find some good links there:

• http://www.wikipedia.org/
• We give in "proa" and find directly a special site  about it.

From that experience, we can learn, that it can be better, to start at first directly with wikipedia,  check the given links and if that is not enough, then use search engines or look at YouTube.

But we can use blogs, even if they are not specialised onto our topic:  We  can  ask the experts on the blogs for their support. Because it is very probable, that they know something also beyond   the special topic of the blog.