Sifry’s Alerts

It’s that time of the year again!  Time to get your new years resolutions up on your blog.

It’s pretty simple, just use the tag “2006resolutions” – and see all the resolutions from around the web.

If you are unused to tagging your blog posts, just cut and paste this into the HTML of your post:

<a href=”http://technorati.com/tag/2006resolutions” rel=”tag”>2006resolutions</a>

Technorati Tags: 2006resolutions

Totally holiday off-topic: I found this picture taken by the Mars Spirit rover of the Martian surface to be totally engrossing.

There’s lots more where this came from.  I just think it’s cool, picturing yourself up there, taking these pictures…

Technorati Tags: mars, rover, spirit, photo, shards

Finally got some time to update the blog after such an incredibly busy month.  Les Blogs in Paris was a lot of fun, and quite interesting.  I got to meet a whole bunch of people that I had known from Blogging, IRC, and other circles – some just from their photos in their Technorati profiles, I felt like I’d known them simply by looking at search results.

One of those great people is Hugh “GapingVoid” Macleod.  I got the opportunity to make a video of him doing his favorite party trick – taking people’s business cards and doing original cartoons on them.  I’m ticked pink to have an original Macleod – I’m getting it framed.

Watch him draw my card.

Technorati Tags: lesblogs, hughmacleod, macleod, hughtrain, gapingvoid, video, quicktime

Giving the new performancing.com blogging tool a quick test drive.  The new release includes Technorati tags as a part of the workflow, cool!

It is a bit difficult to do it, though – you’ve got to go to the Settings area, and add the tags to the option.  But hey, this is a nice way to easily blog right from the browser.  Ecto is still more feature rich, but I’m going to see if having the blogging tool right in the browser will make it easier to blog.

I’m also eagerly looking forward to the next rev of Flock, which I hope will be based on Firefox 1.5, which definitely seems to be faster and more stable than previous revisions.

Technorati Tags: performancing, flock, mozilla, firefox, blogging, ecto, technorati, tags

We just rolled out a whole raft of improvements and tweaks that are built to make Technorati easier to use and easier to understand. A few things that we rolled out:

1) Charts. Get live, updated charts on what people are saying about stuff you care about, like this, which shows a chart of the mentions of “King Kong”:

2) Improved extracts. We’ve worked hard to make the information in the extract that we present to you much more understandable, so that you’ll be able to make a better choice before clicking through to get to the source post. Here’s an extract from a vanity search:

3) Scoped Search based on related tags. You can now scope a search to better understand what a community of people are saying about a subject, all in a tabbed format right below the search box, as shown below:

4) Enhanced profile information. We’ve put up more information about your blogs, and if you’re a tag user, you can even get a map of the most popular tags you use in your blog posts. Simply click on the Author’s name in search results, and you’ll get taken to his or her profile page. Here’s mine, along with a snippet of the tag cloud:

5) Lots more. Including a new Blog Finder widget to help you find out who is blogging about the topics that you’re interested in (don’t forget to claim your blog and add your tags, including your name!), revisions to the Popular widget, and a new tag widget, all down the left-hand side of search results, and lots of other tweaks.

These changes came after weeks of user feedback studies, learning by watching users and what they wanted and did on the site, and lots of tuning and tweaking of the infrastructure. We’re looking for your feedback and comments on the changes! Did we do a good job? Are things easier to use? Is your favorite vanity search more understandable? Does it have more data? What else do you want?

Technorati Tags: blogosphere, blogsearch, charts, feedback, launch, profile, scaling, search, serp, tags, technorati, thanks, weblog

Les Blogs was great, and it was fun to use the new Technorati Mini to show off the conversations happening on the World Live Web – this new experience of the web as a dynamic, living place.

We just rolled out an enhancement to the popular Mini – you can now get a Mini for Tag results! Here’s a tag page for the Syndicate Conference, and here’s a picture showing you where to click to bring up the Mini.

So here’s how you use it:

1) Go to Technorati and click on the Tags tab.

2) Type the tag or tags that you want to track (I used the nifty Advanced Search in the Options area to include a bunch of tags)

2) Then look over at the right hand side of the result page, here’s a screenshot:

3) Click on where it says “View in Mini” (I’ve highlighted it). You’ll need to make sure to allow popups from Technorati if you use popup blocking software like IE or recent versions of Firefox.

4) Enjoy!

Technorati Tags: syndicate, syndicatesf, search, search engine, tags, technorati, technoratitag

I’m here listening to the great sessions at Les Blogs in real-time with the new Technorati Mini window, and it hit me that I bet a whole bunch of people have never heard of or used the Mini. It is, after all, a feature we introduced a few weeks ago. I find myself using the Minis more and more as a great way to keep track of the conversation about me and about the stuff I’m interested in in real-time. I’m loving it here at the conference, it is helping me to keep up with things.

So here’s how you use it:

1) Go to Technorati and type some keywords or a URL that you want to track, e.g. I typed in lesblogs

2) Then look over at the right hand side of the result page, here’s a screenshot:

3) Click on where it says “View in Mini” (I’ve highlighted it). You’ll need to make sure to allow popups from technorati if you use popup blocking software like IE or recent versions of Firefox.

4) Enjoy!

As always, we’re looking for feedback! If you’re here at the conference, come down and give me a shout, I’m sitting down in the front on stage left right by the big podium!