Technorati has created a special page dedicated to aggregating weblog posts related to the four bomb explosions in London this morning and the corresponding activity in London and around the world. The sidebar contains links to popular sources of news and information chosen by the Technorati staff. There is a lot of information still being discovered and it has been interesting to watch the story unfold from millions of keyboards around the world. I was especially surprised to see the number of photographs people posted of their televisions tuned to news channel reporting. Tags: 070705, london…
Category Archives: Search
Yahoo! launches My Web 2.0 beta
Social search is here. Yahoo! introduced My Web 2.0 beta this evening, the first step towards personalized and social search online. I have been exploring the new service for the past half-hour and I am impressed. Personalized search and extending that search to a network of friends is an intensive computational operation and I am surprised Yahoo! has pulled it off. What can you do with My Web 2.0? Each search is limited to your saved bookmarks and the bookmarks of your friends my default. Every bookmark has an option for one or more tags and Yahoo! will suggest tags…
Technorati party on Wednesday
Technorati is having a party! We’re preparing for a busy week and a few product launches and we want to bring the community together to learn face-to-face what’s new and exciting and to gather your feedback. We will also have a few announcements so if you are a blogger in search of a scoop this will be an extra fun party. The party will be held at the House of Sheids on Wednesday, June 22, from 6:30 p.m. until 9:00 p.m. or until whenever everyone decides to leave. Technorati will provide some food and a no-host bar. Please send an…
GoDaddy misstates the facts
Some companies love to issue press releases for every little thing. Go Daddy is one of those companies. Hot on the heels of their press release about their blog’s six-month anniversary comes a press release claiming Bob Parsons has the 23rd most popular blog and the most popular CEO blog. Too bad they provide no fact to support either claim. Technorati ranks blogs according to the most “click-throughs” on commonly-searched keywords. http://www.bobparsons.com covers a variety of topics, many of which do not contain such keywords; for that reason, Parsons’ blog is not listed in the Top 100. Not true. The…
Yahoo! acquires blo.gs
Jim Winstead just announced Yahoo! has purchased blo.gs. The cloud interface will still be available for general use. What does this mean? Yahoo! now has a ping beacon that is already built-in to most weblog software as well as a database of blog posts from the past few years. The cloud technology allows Yahoo! to easily share content update notifications inside and outside the firewall, allowing for easy sharing between blo.gs and Yahoo! Search for example. Jim originally planned on pulling the cloud interface offline at the end of last year and it is good to see the continuation of…
Technorati is sponsoring a trip to BlogHer
Dave Sifry just announced Technorati’s contest to send a blogger to BlogHer, a conference focused on women bloggers taking place in Santa Clara on July 30. Technorati has thought about the best way to support the conference and the bloggers we serve. I thought about some of the different classes of bloggers out there and how each might benefit from attending the conference. I talked with the conference organizers to get a better idea of their vision and what they hope to accomplish. I am very lucky to live in the Bay Area at the center of technology world and…
Tag Tuesday tomorrow at Gordon Biersch in San Francisco
Technorati and Flickr are co-hosting a gathering of tag implementors and other interesting people tomorrow evening at 6:30 p.m. at Gordon Biersch in San Francisco. We are calling the event Tag Tuesday and hope this will be the first of many meetings about tags as a freeform organizational tool. Kevin Marks of Technorati and Stewart Butterfield of Flickr will each have small presentations followed by a discussion. Technorati often receives questions from other organizations about the best way to implement tags within their blog, software, or project. I think the best way to learn is in-person and from people that…
Meet the new Technorati
It’s finally out! Meet the new Technorati (beta), a complete redesign and a few new features thrown in as well. Technorati blogs! Yes, it’s true. Technorati is a blog search company yet had no blog. Now we have two: one for the main site and one for developers. Snazzy new tag pages full of Ajax goodness. Related tags, photos, and links all load after the rest of the page. Subscribe to RSS feeds for tagged posts! This feature has actually been available for a few months but never exposed. We do not include the feed as a link alternate because…
Gathering and distributing search results as RSS
I often receive questions from people about how search engines gather and distribute subscribed search results such as the results provided by Technorati, Feedster, Blogpulse, PubSub, and MSN or Yahoo! Search. It’s worth a brief explanation. Caveat lector, I work for Technorati but I will try to deliver an impartial view of the world of ping and search while keeping the post relatively brief. All of the aforementioned sites output search results in the RSS 2.0 feed format. Your feed results will differ between services based on what is indexed, how frequently it is indexed, and what content is made…
Google Sitemaps using Movable Type
It’s pretty easy to make an XML Sitemap of your blog for easy parsing by Google or other search engines. Just create a new index template and copy the code below. Choose an output file that is easy to remember such as sitemap.xml. Save and rebuild your new template file once you paste the code. <?xml version=”1.0″ encoding=”UTF-8″?> <urlset xmlns=”http://www.google.com/schemas/sitemap/0.84″> <url> <loc><$MTBlogURL encode_xml=”1″$></loc> <priority>1.0</priority> </url> <MTEntries lastn=”9999″> <url> <loc><$MTEntryPermalink encode_xml=”1″$></loc> <lastmod><$MTEntryModifiedDate utc=”1″ format=”%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%SZ”$></lastmod> </url> </MTEntries> </urlset> Now you need to let Google know where to find your sitemap. Open up your web browser and enter http://www.google.com/webmasters/sitemaps/ping?sitemap= + the URL-encoded location…