New Technorati Features: Favorites. And Reading Lists/OPML for Blog Finder

The blogosphere doubles every five months. As I'm writing this, Technorati is tracking 28.4 million blogs. That's a whole lot of voices. Here at Technorati, we want to make the world of weblogs accessible, searchable, and fun for everyone to explore. Today we're taking another step in that direction with a brand new feature: Technorati Favorites.

It's really very simple. Just tell us who your favorite bloggers are and you'll get a custom page that lets you monitor, search, and share your Favorites!

Can't wait? Go give it a try! For the curious, read on for more details.

We've made it as easy as possible to add blogs to your Favorites. All over Technorati, just click the star icon () to add that blog to your favorites. Looking for good blogs on a certain topic? Check out Blog Finder and add blogs from there!

There's also a bookmarklet you can take with you, so you can add to your favorites wherever you browse (get it on the Favorites Help page). And if you use another subscription tool or service, you can export your subscriptions and import them using the Favorites Importer!

Once you've got some favorites, you'll see the most recent posts from them, newest to oldest, as they happen. If you prefer RSS, don't worry, it's available.

Got your own blog? Wanna make it easy for Technorati members to mark is as a favorite? Just use one of these handy buttons! You can even display recent posts from your Favorites on your own blog with the Favorites Widget.

But the best part is that now you can search just your favorite blogs. The second tab on every keyword search result is now "Your Favorites" - click it to search just your favorite blogs.

Finally, Technorati Favorites are for sharing! Note that everyone has a public favorites page (here's mine). You can share yours with your friends with the link at the top of your Favorites page.

To help us kick off this new feature, we asked some prominent bloggers what their favorite blogs are, and they obliged! So check out what's new in these people's favorite blogs:

Thanks to these four for helping us kick off Technorati Favorites, and stay tuned - we'll be adding more fun stuff soon!

Reading Lists For Blog Finder Categories

We've also launched a small but really useful feature - OPML export of each Blog Finder category. You can see the OPML button at the bottom of each results page. This means that if you would like to import authoritative blogs in a category like knitting into your RSS Aggregator, you're all set, you can do it in one easy step. Or even better, if you are using an application with Reading List support, you can simply delegate part of your directory to the Blog Finder category for the subject.

I've been very intrigued by the possibilities around Reading Lists, and so we wanted to support them as quickly as possible in the most intuitive place as possible.

As usual, we really want to know what you think of this new feature, so please let us know.

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