Sifry's Alerts

New Technorati This favelet for IE, Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, etc.

We've just made it easier to find out what people are saying about anything on the web, anytime. The new Technorati This favelet can be used in three ways to put the power of Technorati to use on any web page you're browsing:

1. Select some text on any web page. Click the Technorati This favelet and it will search over 4.7 million weblogs for that text.
2. While browsing any web page, click the Technorati This favelet and it will show you what bloggers are saying about that page right now.
3. If the browser window is empty when you click the Technorati This favelet, it will ask you for a keyword or URL to search for.

Get the favelet.

We've been using them internally for a while, and it really makes a difference in my web browsing experience to get a quick view of what people are saying about any particular article, web page, company, keywords, or blog post.

Adam Bosworth nails it

Adam Bosworth put up a transcript of his talk from ICSOC 2004, and it is quite deep and profound. I'm too busy to add more commentary right now, but if you haven't had a look, it is definitely worth a slow read - there's lots of good meaty stuff in there, very resonant with my experience of software and service development and delivery. Worse is most definitely better.

Blogger goes multilingual

Congratulations to the Blogger folks: InfoWorld: Blogger goes multilingual.

Technorati site redesign and features launched!

The folks on the Technorati team have been working really hard on a number of fixes, improvements, new features, and UI simplifications and tweaks that we've just rolled out.

The most significant improvements:

1. Redesigned home page: Simpler = easier to understand (we hope!)
2. Redesigned and reimplemented keyword search using an entirely revised backend and frontend:
   1. Much faster indexing: most posts are available minutes after creation
   2. Redone search results page we hope that this is more intuitive, and less cluttered.
   3. Better Metadata: Significantly improved permalink detection, as well as post titles.
   4. More data indexed: We currently index posts that are up to about a month old, and we're going further and further back in our post archives every day, with the goal being to have almost 2 years of posts indexed soon.
   5. A new advanced search query language, chock full of new capabilities, including AND, NOT, OR, phrases in quotes, parentheses for word or phrase grouping, date ranges, and more.
   6. Faster results, and a more scalable backend: Query speed is improved, but we're still working on our goal: making every query come back in under a second. Not there yet, but we're doing everything in our power to get there.
   7. There's still some bugs in the code, namely some occasions when a single post shows up multiple times in search results. We're working hard on fixing this.
3. Enhancements to Cosmos searches:
   1. Redone search results page: making search results from keyword and cosmos queries look almost the same, and better display of member photos
   2. Better post and blogroll detection
   3. Speed improvements although we're working hard to continue to improve here as well.
4. Our Thanksgiving developer's contest we're having a contest to thank our developers and to showcase some of their great code, and we're giving away a new Mac Powerbook and a bunch of iSights (or equivalent gift certificates) for great new apps that use or integrate our APIs
5. Some new features still in testing: but we wanted you to see these alpha features:
   1. Technorati Top 20 MP3s - MP3s on the web that are getting links from bloggers, updated hourly.
   2. The Technorati Top 20 MP3 Podcast feed, ready for your favorite podcast reader.
6. A number of fixes and improvements to our members area, making it easier to create and manage watchlists, claim blogs, sign up for the developer program, and more.

We're working on continuous core service fixes, tweaks, improvements, and new features as well, there's still so much more to do. When we go live the new features and enhancements we've created will also be available using our APIs as well (more documentation at our Developer's Site )

So here's the deal: We're looking for feedback, suggestions, criticism, and comments. Top of mind for the team is how we can be of service to you, to bloggers, and to folks who care about this user-generated content. We made so many of these changes and improvements because of you - your suggestions were incredibly useful to us.

Thanks again for all your support in the past, I hope that we can continue to be of service to you.

Technorati tracks Vote Links...

Thanks to some initiative and hard work from Kevin Marks, we've put up a page that tracks Vote Links. Vote Links allow you to add some more information to a link when you make it - it allows you to “vote-for” “vote-abstain” or “vote-against” the hyperlink. These votes are mutually exclusive and represent agreement, abstention (or indifference), and disagreement with the contents of the link.

Here's an example: If you want to show your approval of John Kerry and disapproval of George Bush, you can do it the following way:

<a rel="vote-for" href="http://www.johnkerry.com">John Kerry</a>
<a rel="vote-against" href="http://www.georgewbush.com">George Bush</a>

When you make your post using one of the major weblog tools, Technorati will get notified of your post, and will add a count of your vote to our Vote Link tracking page.

By the way, you can vote for or against ANYTHING. For example, you can let people know that you like the EFF and hate the KKK - allowing you to link to organizations and sites that you disapprove of, without bestowing approval or authority on the link.

Right now, this is a complete experiment, and the page should be considered alpha. It could be reorganized or removed at any time. We're really interested in hearing more about what you think, send us feedback and let us know (or give us some votes about the page itself!)

If you want to see how all this works, use “View Source” on this page, check out the Vote Link documentation, or have a look at the HTML snippets we put on the Vote Link page itself. And all you US Citizens: Don't forget to vote in the elections!