September 1, 2005

Technorati Blog Finder Beta Launches

So, while all of our infrastructure work progresses and our backend search and infrastructure engineers are busy upgrading and scaling the service, Technorati's front-end designers and developers cooked up a fun new feature: Technorati Blog Finder.

Blog Finder helps answer the question, "How can you find authoritative blogs on a subject?"

Derek Powazek posts about Blog Finder on the Technorati Weblog. My favorite feature is that it allows you, the blogger, to tag your blog, and add yourself to the categories that you want to be listed under. We've made some educated guesses based on how people tagged their posts over the last 6 months - and over 2 million blogs are already included in the index, but now you have the power to add yourself to the directory in a few simple steps.

Posted by dsifry at September 1, 2005 6:58 PM | TrackBack | View blog reactions
Comments

Nice idea and surely better than just another Top* list. If the backend would work.

The fact, that one can tag your blog - given, that *that* works this time might help; but then again, it will be a list of being ranked by the links Technorati counts.

So let's see, tag links.
Which have to be on the front page, which means, I have to put them at the top of an article instead of at the bottom.

Which only get oh about 1 out of 5 achknowledged by Technorati? Even though I monitor them very carefully, make sure my feedburner feed is updated before I ping Technorati?

Sometimes (seldomly) it appears days later, which makes using the tag useless.

Frankly, while I like Technorati a lot, the fact that there is no predictable outcome to "How do I send a tag to them to make sure it appears". No responses, no checking mechanism, knowing of other blogs who are the same - I am getting tired of this.

I am hoping for Google or Yahoo to enter the game of tagging, because they know how to spider and store.

Posted by: Nicole Simon at September 2, 2005 2:01 AM

Dave...I'm not sure you're getting the point...again...

I'm not sure that bloggers want an easier tool to find *athoritative* blogs. People know where and who the authoritative blogs of note are, just the way they know how to find the New York Times on line.

What bloggers want to find are *new* voices. People who are saying things that maybe the big, authoritative people aren't saying. Bloggers know where the information is, Dave...we can find that pretty easily. And maybe we're not interested in making the powerful any more powerful.

Further, those of us that want to be found don't necessarily want some scheme that's more complicated to manipulate than the blogging software we already use. Who really has the time to figure out all the little blogging doo-hickeys you guys keep coming up with? Only the powerful who can hire some little guy to set it all up for them...

Most of us still use Technorati because, like the big-time bloggers, it's been around for a long time, it's easy to find and is more comprehensive than the newer stuff...but it still isn't serving us in the Technorati Tail all that well. As it is now, we're all just chasing out tails trying to keep up with its new bells and whistles.

Posted by: Tish G at September 2, 2005 8:04 AM

Hi Dave,

This is a great tool. I just had someone ask me the other day how to find a blog within a specific cateogory. Thank you for introducing this.

I do have one concern that I would like to voice. What if SPAM blogs start tagging thier blogs with keywords like - PR, Marketing, Books, etc - in order to gain readership through this new tool. Does this concern you?

Posted by: Blake at September 2, 2005 10:57 AM

This should be a hit. Many bloggers like myself have long awaited this ability for blogs.

Posted by: Jerry at September 4, 2005 9:35 AM