lijitI know, this is a wine blog, but to satisfy the technology geek in me, I wanted to comment on a new tool I recently added to my site: Lijit as a recommendation from Andrea of Andy’s Goode Life.  I promise, I’ll get back to wine next time. 

Lijit is basically a search tool that allows your readers to search for and access content on your site and the sites of everyone in your social network (via blogroll) from one place.  It’s only been on my site for one week and I have not performed a super-detailed or formal analysis, I’ll leave that up to the gentlemen at VinTank.  These are just some thoughts I jotted down when playing around with the tool.  I would love to hear some other opinions.  By the way, you can access it from the sidebar to the right under the Links directory.

Pros:

1. Setup was pretty easy and they have a fairly extensive list of social networking sites they are able to integrate with.  Additionally, it automatically uses your blogroll to begin building your network the engine uses.  This is configurable via your user page on the Lijit site.

2. The biggest value I see is the ability to access other sites from one place, rather than having to visit each site and performing a search on each one.

3. It uses the Google Search engine (pro/con?) which also allows Google ads (pro/con?) on the search results page to be more targeted and reducing search “noise”.lijit-2

4. The “Explore” feature is pretty cool, though, is a little disappointing graphically.  With all of the technology that is available (i.e. Silverlight) today, I expected more.  It displays your network in bubbles and you can click through your network and access sites that way.  This is a feature that could benefit from some additional features to create more value, like some integration with other blog tools or the display of additional information about those sites.

Cons:

1. It doesn’t seem to discriminate between the content of posts and text elsewhere on the site, like the sidebars.  So, for example, when I entered “Murphy Goode”, the results page showed all my posts, even though most weren’t about MG, because I referenced Murphy Goode on a link in my sidebar… not sure technically if there is an easy way to “fine tune” this?

2. You are required to select a tab on the results page for the views you want: Blog, Network, etc.  However, the default tab is configurable, so that might reduce the con-ness of this feature in my mind.

3. It was not easy to find the “Close” button for the Explore bubble graphic to get me back to my blog page.  I eventually found it way in the upper right-hand corner of the screen.  Also, see disappointment in graphical capabilities above.

4. In the Explore feature I could not find a way to get back to “home”, or my site after drilling-down several layers through the network, without drilling back up, which will be harder to do as your network grows.  Granted, I never read user manuals so maybe there is a way to do this, but I am pretty good with figuring technology out and this should be intuitive.

In conclusion, as I said before, I think the value here is really the capability of searching a network of sites from one place, which makes it very convenient for the reader.  Of course, the level of value will be dependent upon how deep a particular site’s network is as well.  Other than that, I think it has some room for improvement in the area of ease of use and GUI (see Explore).