Several moons ago a very nice young woman named Tara sent me a very nice young e-mail. She immediately struck me as someone who had good taste. Granted that's probably because she started off her e-mail by complimenting me on my general awesomeness (true, true). But that's beside the point. She wrote me to tell me about a new tool for bloggers called Lijit.

Here's how she described it:

We at Lijit Networks have developed a Personal Network Search which is a kind of vertical search that revolves around a person, their online content and their network. Basically, our wijit (a creative reworking of the widget) will allow your readers to not only search your blog site but also your del.icio.us or magnolia bookmarks, anything that presents itself as an RSS feed (flickr, youtube, etc.) or other sources that you have marked as trusted.

A benefit to you is that you get a better sense of your audience, what they are searching you about and what topics they believe you to be an expert. And your readers benefit by having the opportunity to access relevant search results gleaned from your collective online expertise.

Of course I installed the wijit right away. Unfortunately I found out about it after I had almost completed the plans for the "new" template that is currently in place here. So, the wijit didn't make it into that code until just this week when I finally got around to figuring out how I might include it without breaking something else (even programmers follow the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mantra). You can see it if you click the "Search..." button above, which through the magic of javascript and css, shows/hides the search bar. The "Suprise Me" button is pretty fun: it takes you to a random page in my collective content, whether it be a blog post, bookmarked page, flickr photo, etc.

Lijit is definitely a cool way to allow readers to search the multitude of networks we all belong to in this information-saturated Internet of ours. As of writing this, Lijit supports searching blogs, Blink List, Blue Dot, ClipMarks, del.ici.ous, digg, Furl, Ma.gnolia, reddit, Stumble Upon, flickr, YouTube, LinkedIn, Live Journal, MySpace, Twitter, MyBlogLog, Facebook, and the option to add the URLs/RSS feeds of any other services not listed. It's pretty thorough. In addition, Lijit has the concept of a "network" of "trusted informers", a list of people whose content can be included in results when a user searches your content. So, if miss Tara Anderson, Lijit evangelist, is in my network, and you search me for say "Transformers slash fiction", Lijit will return a list of my blog posts, articles dugg, YouTube videos, flickr photos, etc. on the topic, in addition to places where Tara has done so as well.

In addition there is a stats section to show you how people are searching your site, and for what, with a nice amount of data to pore over (pie charts ftw!) It gives you the opportunity to ponder, like me, who it is that is searching your blog for nude pictures of Amber MacArthur.

They welcome feedback from bloggers, and seem to regularly update the service with new or improved features. You can find out more at the Lijit website, and while you're there you might as well sign up and grab the code of the wijit for your blog. And if the features weren't enough to convince you to at least try it out, I suggest checking out this video. Personally, I like my Web 2.0 companies funky, and wearing parachute pants.