February 21, 2006
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:
- Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post
- Christopher Michel of Military.com
- Doc Searls of the Doc Searls Weblog
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.
Technorati Tags: beta, favorites, launch, opml, blogfinder, readinglist, technorati
Posted by dsifry at February 21, 2006 6:07 PM | TrackBack | View blog reactionsneat stuff - did up a list here for make:
http://www.technorati.com/faves/ptorrone
would it be possible to export that as opml too?
cheers,
pt
Not particularly useful when it's showing some regularly updated blogs as not updated for nearly six months. Technorati's usefulness at this point is basically that it's a nice archive of the blogosphere before July of 2005.
Posted by: Tom Hanna at February 21, 2006 11:57 PMThank, David, great feature. I wonder if this can be a replacement for bloglines in the long time.
However, I can't import from bloglines. It only takes the first blog in the OPML file.
Sounds a lot like Findory Favorites
but without any personalization.
Why the 50 feed limit in Technorati Favorites? That's a bit unusual, isn't it?
Posted by: Greg Linden at February 22, 2006 8:37 AMTwo requests:
1) A way to get more that 20 items in the OPML export at a time (I know you can page over it, but most reading list applications like to get it all in one file)
2) OPML export of list of blogs in each fave.
Posted by: Nick Lothian at February 22, 2006 2:56 PMBacking up the requests for opml imports. It would be good if it presented a list of every feed in the file and let you select the fifty you wanted to import.
Posted by: James at February 23, 2006 1:53 PMI don't get it Dave, when I click on the OPML for a Blog Finder group, it doesn't take me to a URL (where you would see the raw XML outline of the OPML)...instead it wants me to save/open a file.
Where is the OPML URL so I can subscribe to it in BlogBridge?
Posted by: John Tropea at February 23, 2006 4:32 PMOff topic, it's great that you are adding all these new features, though it now seems I'm consigned to Technorati hell. My weblog stopped being indexed days ago and from reading around, there's about as much chance as getting that sorted out as a snowball has in a warm place.
I'm dispapointed as I had both relied upon and talked up technorati. Guess I'll just unclaim my blog and wait for a more stable ap to come along.
Posted by: Dan at February 25, 2006 9:56 PMOne problem I see with favorites, is that probably it will lead to A-listers favoring other A-listers and us poor long-tailers being favored by none. Sigh. Tough is the life of a poor Z-lister.
Posted by: Ugo Cei at February 27, 2006 1:36 PMHi Dave,
I think Technorati is exploring some neat ways to index and sort the massive amount of new information contained in blogs, and I commend you for your work in this.
I have a suggestion regarding BlogFinder: I think you could be a little smarter in the way you rank the blogs that you show with that service.
Taking my case for a concrete example: I write a blog that only deals with life in Iceland, and thus I created only one Technorati tag for the blog: Iceland.
But if I do a BlogSearch for Iceland, the first thing I see is Ravings of a Corporate Mommy, a blog that has more inbound links (and thus "authority") than mine, but is tagged with 12 tags (Blog, Chicago, Corporate Life, Daily Life, Iceland, Infertility, Journal, Multicultural, My Life, Parenting, Random, Weblog). Sometimes this blog deals with Iceland, but more often it deals with other topics. If I were searching for blogs about Iceland, I would want blogs such as mine, that deal exclusively with Iceland, to appear higher in the list.
Perhaps having a broad subject range (signaled by a large number of tags) should dilute a blog's ranking in BlogFinder; "authority" should be tempered by topical spread. I think this or a similar modification to the algorithm would make the BlogFinder tool return more useful results.
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