Technorati released a redesigned search results page and member profiles tonight, including some features I’ve been wanting for a long time. You can find the official announcement on the Technorati weblog and I will share my personal thoughts and favorites below. Personal tag cloud Technorati now displays a personal tag cloud for each member profile! You can now glance at a blogger’s profile and get a pretty good idea about his or her most blogged about topics. Tim Appnel’s Tags.App plugin for Movable Type displays some similar tag visualizations but now anyone on any blog platform can visualize their topical…
Category Archives: Technorati
Technorati Kitchen: it’s what’s cooking
Technorati just introduced the Technorati Kitchen, an area where we can post projects we have been working on that we do not feel are ready for integration on the main site. The first project available in the Technorati Kitchen is Explore, a way to discover the most popular recent blog posts around a specific topic of interest. You can use Explore to see emerging trends in the areas you care about or just catch up with the top stories of the day in a few minutes. The beta moniker is so overused and abused no one can really take it…
Happy birthday Technorati
Three years ago, on November 27, 2002, Technorati was introduced to the world. Technorati started as a way for Dave Sifry to track who was talking about his blog online and the project eventually grew into a company of 30+ employees. The blogosphere often gets caught up in the buzz of the moment, so here is a little history from Technorati in 2002: The first Technorati 100. Scripting News was on top with links from 598 blogs and Boing Boing was #4 with links from 408 inbound blogs. 12,739 blogs watched in its first week. $5 a year for…
Technorati clustered search
Technorati has combined keyword search and Blog Finder to enable clustered search across various blog-level topic areas. Searching for the information you care about can be a bit elusive. A gardener looking for the last information about a bush will be overwhelmed with information about George W. Restrict your search to gardening and you have some interesting results. You have a similar problem with the search term “Java.” Would you like information about coffee, the Indonesian island, or the programming language? You can combine advanced keyword search with advanced tag search for some even more interesting results. You can search…
Blogging and PR survey
Technorati and Edelman are partnering to help public relations and corporate communications in general better understand the preferences of bloggers. I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with PR pitches and there is definitely room for improvement. If you would like to help companies better tailor their methods and their approach to blogging you can share your opinions and answer a short survey. A bad PR agency e-mails me a press release asking if I would please post the press release on my blog. Good PR is when I am introduced to new things that solve a personal problem or…
Tag Tuesday with HP and Technorati
Tag Tuesday is back! If you are in the San Francisco area come out to Varnish Fine Art this Tuesday at 6:30 p.m. Scott Golder from HP Labs will talk about his recent research paper on collaborative tagging and Kevin Marks of Technorati will talk about the design and implementation of Blog Finder. Tag Tuesday is a developer-centered event. If you are working with tags or related methods of user classification and would like to present, let me know. Tags: hp, blogfinder, tags, tagtuesday…
Running a reliable blog tool and ping service
Most people do not realize how ping notification services (“ping beacons”) can negatively affect user experience for a blog tool vendor. Blog authors usually welcome the publicity but are not sure who to blame when something goes wrong, if the user even knows what went wrong and where. Let’s start with some background on the process of a ping notification (“ping”). The blog author hits the “Post” button, publishing his or her blog entry to a publicly available website. The blog tool retrieves a listing of specified services that are either platform-defined defaults or user-specified preferences. The blog tool attempts…
Updated Hurricane Katrina page on Technorati
Yesterday afternoon I updated the Hurricane Katrina page on Technorati with new first-person reports and information resources about the hurricane and its aftermath. The original featured content from Monday focused on the latest news about the hurricane and it’s immediate impact. There were links to weather sites such as NOAA and first-hand accounts from people who had been in the middle of the winds and rains that tore through southern Louisiana and southern Mississippi. Many people updated their blogs with the latest news, accounts, and general observations from their immediate geographic area. Commenters provided advice from tornado and hurricane affected…
Technorati Blog Finder
Technorati just introduced Technorati Blog Finder, a browsable and searchable directory of blogs powered by tags. The Technorati Blog Finder helps you find blogs of interest in the subject areas you care about. The Technorati Blog Finder is a product created with a lot of user feedback about what groups they identify with online and how they would like to find other bloggers within that interest. Technorati seeded the list using a blogger’s most common post tags but authors can edit, change, or delete these tags — up to 20 total — through their Technorati member account page. You can…
Hurricane Katrina on Technorati
I spent my morning summarizing the current happenings around Hurricane Katrina for a new Technorati page on the topic. Some interesting observations with limited citations as I am just braindumping. Bloggers opened their houses to each other sight unseen. Blogs with video and photo coverage quickly exceeded their bandwidth limits and were offline this morning. CNN setup a special citizen journalists page for submissions. Technorati received calls from media outlets this morning in their search of the latest news from the blogosphere. Bloggers lost power and Internet access put kept on blogging through laptops connected to dial-up modems and free…