Monday 27 April 2009

The wonders of Technorati

Hands up if you've ever heard of Technorati?

If you read blogs, and by reading this entry your answer is 'yes', then Technorati is a site you should look at. If you blog, then you should definitely head there.

Technorati is a website which gives order to the (often) chaotic, messy and noisy world of blogging. It, essentially, acts as a big catalogue for the 'blogosphere' - a collective term for all the blogs on the internet. 

The site publishes content from blogs, arranging posts based on subject matter - meaning visitors can search the blogosphere to see what's being talked in any particular subject - e.g. mobile phones, Thailand, Britain's Got Talent, or whatever.

As the blogosphere is a pretty crowded place, blogs are ranked in order to give prioritise content from more influential and established bloggers. Thus allowing Technorati to gauge what issues are hot on the web.

So, for those who like to read blogs, Technorati will 'sort the wheat from the chaff' and make sense of the noise of the blogosphere to tell you what topics are trending/popular.

As Technorati is THE place to hear what's going on in the blogosphere, all bloggers should register their blogs on the site. Your blog won't appear unless you do.

It's a very easy process and one of the benefits, which I love, is that you can see who/what is linking to your content - i.e. how influential your blog is. 

For example, I had the honour of featuring in this Globalvoices article on the recent Red Shirt protests, the content was then syndicated on the New York Times website here.

[Globalvoices is another website worth looking at. It contains articles written using news and content from blogs across the globe, often translating from native languages.]

Once your blog is registered, its content will be available on Technorati making the site a forum for broadcasting your posts to a new audience of potential readers.

Technorati does do many other things, including linking to social bookmarking sites (social networks which rate content to show what is popular/hot on the web).

It isn't perfect, I think it could allow more user interaction, for example promoting content you like, to give it a more viral flavour. But as blog resources go, it's one of the best going and a must for bloggers, as I keep saying.

Check it out at www.technorati.com.

3 comments:

X said...

geek !

Talen said...

Technorati isn't what it used to be. So many people played games inflating their numbers that it really lost a lot of it's flavor in the last year.

Jon said...

Er, classic response from X, the bootser of all things (read your latest!).

Hi Talen, thanks for stopping by. Totally agree with your comment about the numbers game. It's just part of human nature, tell me a web service that doesn't have users behaving this way - be it Twitter, Facebook, Digg, I could go on...

Fact is that Technorati remains a useful way of gauging a blog's influence. Making it is a service all bloggers should register for.

Of course, the more advanced appreciate that there are better content promotion sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, StumbleUpon etc.

The web is always evolving.

What services do you use personally aside from Twitter?