technorati's Blog Finder
A few days ago, Technorati
announced Blog Finder, which is something like a self-managed directory with results filterable by rank, alphabet, or content freshness. It extends the concept of
tagging posts to the tagging of entire blogs. Just like tagging blog posts, tagging your blog is up to you, and you can apply up to twenty tags to your blog when configured through your Technorati account. In the words of the
Technorati Weblog entry describing the release, "Blog Finder takes the power of the folksonomy—bottom-up, user-generated tags—and applies it to the Blogosphere".
So, how do you do it? Simple. Very, very simple. If you are a Technorati member: login to your account, click on "configure your blog" and you will see twenty text fields waiting for you to fill things in. Do so, then press the "save changes" button at the bottom of your page. You can check your work immediately by going to the
blogs page and entering a tag in the search field. You will see a list of results by rank (by default), but you can click on tabs to display your results in other ways (recently updated or alphabetical). For additional information, including information on how non-Technorati members can get in on the action, visit the
Blog Finder help page. Niall Kennedy
summarized it thusly: "Technorati Blog Finder helps authors better define how they would like to be discovered and helps readers discover new sources."
At the Social Software blog,
Barb Dwyard writes that this is an attempt by Technorati to "solve the 'show me the best blog about knitting/auto racing/insert topic here' that folks have been asking for" and I think that's true because by default the results of a Blog Finder search
can represent "the top n" in a topic. But the "top n" is still based on Technorati's count of incoming links (the accuracy is as disputed as any other index, although I personally find Technorati to be the most accurate), and the "topic" is self-determined. In other words, there's a high possibility of rogue self-tagging for the purpose of spamming. Mentioned in the Social Software post is
Rojo's reader-driven tagging and how the lists might differ.
Building this sort of look at the content of blogosphere is easier than tagging posts (but
that's not difficult!) because you only have to do it once and then modify it as needed. I would recommend that anyone with a claimed Technorati blog go on and configure your categories. I've tagged myself as such: Academia, Blogger, Blogging, California, General Musings, General Ramblings, Life, Literature, Personal, San Francisco Bay Area, San Jose, Silicon Valley, Stuff, Technology, Writing. If you search via Blog Finder for "general ramblings" you get
these results, with this blog currently (at time of writing) 3rd (by rank) of 59 tagged as such [#1 is
I Am Dr. Laura's Worst Nightmare, written by Grace Davis, a very nice and smart lady whom I met at BlogHer].
Go on, tag yourself and then use Blog Finder as appropriate. I dig it, hopefully you will too.
technorati tag: technorati
