Blog Research

Blog Research

Overview

Collects evidence from individual and organizational blogs: practitioner write-ups, tutorials, opinion pieces, an organization's own technical blog. Distinguishing job: blog content ranges from tier 2 (an org's official blog, on-claim-about-that-org) to tier 5 (anonymous content-farm posts) — author identity resolution is most of the work here.

Layer rule: produces evidence, not results. Synthesis and confidence status are the orchestrator's job.

When to use

Direct use: "what does [named expert] say about X", "find a tutorial for Y". As a component: orchestrator dispatches this for implementation/opinion sub-questions where a practitioner's direct account matters more than official docs.

Don't use for: an organization's own official docs/announcements (→ official-source-research — same publisher, different tier by default), news coverage of an event (→ news-research), pages with no identifiable author or track record (→ web-research, capped at low tier there too).

Workflow

1. Resolve author identity first — this decides everything downstream. Look for: a named author with a bio, a track record (cited elsewhere, known conference talks, GitHub presence), or organizational affiliation stated as the post's byline. Log what was found in limitations if identity is thin or absent — an unattributed post is not automatically discarded, but it caps at tier 4-5.
2. Distinguish original from syndicated/aggregated. Many blog platforms mirror or aggregate posts (dev.to cross-posts, Medium republishes, translated mirrors). If the passage attributes the content elsewhere or matches a known original almost verbatim, route to engine/origin-tracing.md before treating this post as the source.
3. Search via web-research's chain (WebSearch + WebFetch — this skill doesn't need a separate tool chain, the distinguishing work is the author/originality resolution, not the fetch mechanism). If nothing surfaces, run references/query-relaxation.md.
4. Extract publish date per the cascade in references/tooling.md — blog platforms are usually good about structured metadata (dev.to, Medium, Substack all expose article:published_time).
5. Archive per references/citation-rules.md — personal blogs and smaller platforms have real disappearance risk (platform shutdowns, domain expiry), archive proactively.
6. An individual is one root: root_id: person:<canonical-handle>. The same author's blog post, conference talk, and newsletter are one voice — quoting three of them is not three independent sources. For an org's official blog, use org:<name> instead (engine/origin-tracing.md).
7. Assign tier per references/source-tiers.md's blog table (2 = org's own official channel on a claim about that org; 3 = individual with demonstrated expertise; 4 = anonymous/unverified; 5 = content-farm pattern) and purpose — tutorials/how-tos are usually implementation, stated positions are opinion, factual claims about a product/event are fact only when backed by the author's own primary access (they built it, they tested it) rather than repeating something they read elsewhere.
8. Write the evidence record per engine/evidence-contract.md, verification_status: pending. Do not self-verify.

Output

One evidence record per claim, appended to the run's evidence.jsonl.

Common mistakes