Thursday, September 27, 2007

#9 Getting not-so-technical with Technorati

You have been blogging for awhile, you might be wondering how big the blogosphere is?
Acccording to Technorati, the leading search tool and authority for blogs, the number of blogs doubles about every 6 months. As of September 2007, there were approximately 107.5 million blogs tracked on Technorati.

Blogging publishing tools are being taken advantage of by almost every industry, including libraries.

So do you get your blog listed as part of the blogosphere and tag your posts with keywords to make them more findable through a Technorati search?
Your blog is probably already being captured by Technorati due to the fact that you're already using Blogger, the most popular blogging tool.
If you want to 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.
To tag posts with Technorati tags, you need to do add a little bit of HTML code to the bottom of your post (see my example below) and Technorati will pick up these tags when it spiders (or web crawls) your site.

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 feature

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?
  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.

OPTIONAL:
If you're up for a challenge, learn how to tag your posts by with Technorati tags so they can join tag searches.

You may also want to consider claiming your blog and creating a watchlist.
NOTE: When adding HTML code, you'll want to make sure you're in Blogger's Edit HTML window.

1 comment:

oscar8 said...

I'm having trouble with Technorati via Mozilla Firefox - whenever I try to do a search, I get a dialogue box asking me to select a program to open an application/octet-stream with. I'll try it on IE6 later...