john-23things

Technorati has been around since 2002, when it looked a bit like this:
Technorati '02 was something of a one-trick pony, although to be fair it was a neat trick, and a new trick. According to Wired News, there were only 500,000 blogs at the time. As a new search service, Technorati offered users and searchers a way to track the links between these blogs in the form of a "Link Cosmos," a list of inbound links to a blog, ordered chronologically with the most recent on top. This was a great way to see who was reading your stuff, and to be able to enter into a dialog with bloggers who were responding to your content.

If ever there was evidence required of the expansion in Blogging, and the development and integration of Web 2.0 services, Technorati's screenshots would serve the purpose. Today, the site looks like this:


and the service is less a one-trick pony and more a whole stable of Lipizzaners. Extreme Home Makeover, anyone? According to Technorati's April 2007 "State of the Live Web" report (which offers abundant statistical information about the scale of web 2.0 activity, and provides an excellent justification for the 23 things program, by the way,) there are now more than 70 million weblogs being tracked by the service.

Compare with August 2006, if you'd like to!

Technorati has grown and changed to keep pace with this rapid expansion. You can still check out your cosmos on Technorati (View my less than stellar results, then show me some link-love, people!) but now you can do so much more. Technorati now offers a wide range of information about what they're calling the live web. To get a sense of the broad range of features and functions which are now integrated into Technorati, check out the State of Technorati report from April 2007.

The crucial adjustment that Technorati made was the switch from exclusive search to social interaction by introducing Tags. Content producers can now tag both their site (with major content / topic headings) and their individual posts (with tags reflecting the content of that particular entry). This produces another folksonomy of user-generated labels for content. Account holders can keep a list of their favorite blogs, and tag those with relevant terms. Authors can tag their posts for detection by Technorati. Searchers can look for content by tag using the Tag Search section of the advanced search page.

On tags... It is important to note that Blogger's Labels have the rel="tag" attribute in the code for each label, so they're detectable as tags by all sites that recognise the protocol. Check it out:

<a href='http://john-23things.blogspot.com/search/label/23_things' rel='tag'>23_things</a>

When you label your posts in Blogger you're tagging them too. Labeling your posts will ensure that they're accessible by Technorati and a number of other tag-search services. People will be able to find and see your stuff. Cool, huh? The tag protocol is used widely across other services and sites that use tags. Check out Keotag as an example. Enter the tag that you're searching for... perhaps thing_1, as used here, then click the icon of the service that you want to search. On Technorati, you'll find my first post. Other services return other goodies, and some seem to filter more effectively than others. Want to know more about adding labels to your 23 things blog? View Blogger's Labels Help.

Back to Technorati: The full range of Technorati stats and information about your blog is available in a single sidebar widget. Here's what it looks like:

To get this box for your blog, sign in & access the widget setup under Edit Profile > Blogs. With all the bells and whistles installed, this box enables you to add site search, a tag-cloud of your most frequently used tags, a link to your profile, a photo, a one-click link to your link cosmos search results (which is where the service started out, remember?) and, most interestingly, a box that displays your authority.

Authority is an interesting concept, and is one way that we as librarians might be able to evaluate the reliability and accuracy of blogs as sources. As they say on the Authority Support Page: "Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has." If a blogger is writing great content with a wide audience (or publishing celebrity gossip) the likelihood is that they'll have inbound links from a large number of sites and will thusly exhibit a high authority number.

Just like Del.icio.us (Thing #13), you can also use Technorati to track stuff you like, by adding tags to your watchlist or adding blogs to your list of favorites. I've added the full-featured Technorati widget and a favorites button to my 23-things blog. Check out the cool new stuff in the sidebar, & have fun exploring the content and services offered by Technorati. Who knows what this thing will look like in another five years!