I believe there is a critical mass of bright people coming up with great ideas on how to better connect the weblog world. The momentum continues to build as, almost weekly, new techniques progress from mindwalks to small proofs to widespread usage. The results of this work so far, great tools and techniques for making blogs more useful and more powerful, include RSS auto-discovery, the Daypop search and top40, Blogdex, BlogChalking, MEETUP, and many more.
But one problem that doesn't yet have an elegant solution is the difficulty of searching for a string within a blog posting within a certain date range. Daypop allows you to search for terms in blogs which have been updated within a certain time but that doesn't help me.
Here's my problem: Yesterday I searched daypop for blogs with comments that contain "mozilla". I read all of them. Today I search daypop for blogs with comments that contain "mozilla" where the blog was updated in the last day. The results are scores of the sites I read yesterday which have new comments that do not contain the word "mozilla" and a few sites which just added an entry containing "mozilla". What I really want are just the sites where someone posted comment since yesterday containing the string "mozilla" and none of the sites where the comment containing "mozilla" was posted before yesterday.
How could this be solved? My first thought was that Daypop could cache and archive all of the sites it indexes every day and let me search the diff between two archives of the same site. My second thought was to pose the question on my blog and ask other smarter people if there are solutions we could implement in the blogging tools or in our posts themselves that could make this easier. So if you've got any ideas post them and I'll do my best to query for them.
