Sifry’s Alerts

Today is an auspicious day, Technorati is now tracking over one million weblogs. We hit 100,000 back on March 5, and 200,000 on April 6nbsp; We hit the 400,000 mark on June 21. Technorati is currently tracking about 7,000 new weblogs per day, which means that a new weblog is being created approximately every 12 seconds. And I know we’re not catching them all.

I’ve been working three new Technorati API calls.  The first is
called getinfo.  It tells
you things that Technorati knows about a user.  In the simplest
case you can use  getinfo
to find out information that a blogger wants to make known about
himself, along with some information that Technorati has calculated and
verified about that person.

http://api.technorati.com/getinfo?username=dsifry
(experts, see expert note below)

This will return an XML structure with information about the
user.  Here’s an example of the XML returned:

The document is broken up into two sections: The first part describes
some information that the user (dsifry) wants to allow people to know
about himself.  This information is available in HTML form at:

http://www.technorati.com/profile/dsifry

In this case, all the personal information that I
want you to know about me is my username, and a link to a picture of
myself, and the blogs I author.  The second part of the document is a listing of the
weblogs that the user has successfully href="http://www.technorati.com/members/claimblog.html">claimed
and the information that Technorati knows about these weblogs. This is
the default, by the way.  You’ll see lots of information in there,
like the Name and URL of each blog, its RSS feed (if it exists), number
of bloggers who are currently linking to it, when it was last updated, and some other optional data, like a link to a FOAF file, or
GeoURL. 

More to come, including information on the validate API call, which is
built to make it easy to validate blog and comment postings…

(Expert note: This is a RESTful call, as with all the Technorati API
calls, you can use GET or POST to the href="http://api.technorati.com/getinfo?username=dsifry">http://api.technorati.com/getinfo
URI)