#19 Technorati

You might think Technorati would be something you find on an Italian lunch menu, but the only things on offer at this site are blogs. Technorati is the leading search tool and authority for blogs, the number of blogs doubles just about every 6 months with over 89.6 million blogs currently being tracked by the site. It' so fast that the entry I made 20 minutes ago about del.icio.us showed up in a search of "library 2.0" just now!

Yes, these numbers are astounding, but as you’ve already seen for yourselves, blogging is so easy that these publishing tools are being taken advantage of by almost every industry, including libraries. Technorati estimates that 175,000 new blogs are created every day!

So how does a person get their blog listed as part of the blogosphere and how can you tag your posts with keywords to make them more findable through a Technorati search? The answer to the first question is that your blog is probably already being captured by Technorati due to the fact that you're already using Blogger, the most popular blogging tool. But if you want to join the party and have your blog officially listed on Technorati and also take advantage of the watchlist and other features, you’ll need to claim your blog yourself. As for tagging posts with Technorati tags? This is easy, too. All you need to do is add a little bit of HTML code to the bottom of your post and Technorati will pick up these tags when it spiders (or web crawls) your site.

There are a lot of new features that have been added to Technorati in the recent past, including new ways to search for blogs. You can search for keywords in blog posts, search for entire blog posts that have been tagged with a certain keyword, or search for blogs that have been registered and tagged as whole blogs about a certain subject (like photography or libraries).

Discovery Resources:

Technorati Tour – videocast of new features & new look
Technorati Popular features

Discovery Exercise:

1. Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for “Learning 2.0” in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different? Some of these searches are found in the Advanced Search feature.
   
2. Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?
   
3. Create a blog post about your discoveries on this site.