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…
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…
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…
Technorati Japan just entered beta. It's exciting to see the first of what I hope will be many country-specific Technorati sites unveiled to the world. Have you ever wondered what are the top blogs in Japanese or the most talked about books in Japan? Now you can! The internationalization process is really interesting and exposes a lot of details about your data structure but mostly how you look at the world. Every society and country has their own ways of using weblogs and Japan is no different. Recent legislation in Japan requires all personally identifiable data travel over SSL. Anonymity…
Technorati has partnered with Salon.com to integrate weblog content and commentary in Salon.com's home page, the end of every article, and a roundup. Richard Ault took some good screenshots of the new features if you would like a small walk-through. I am really excited to see the writing of the masses combined with the edited writing of the few. Salon.com has been publishing original content online since 1995 and I have been reading the site intermittently since it started. Salon owns The WELL, the most famous online community. Salon chose to measure its hottest stories by the number of bloggers…
AlwaysOn Network is working with Technorati to create a list of 100 top individuals who are leveraging the power of communities online to accomplish great things. The list is branded as the "Open Media 100" but has nothing to do with the Open Media Network. The list will not be ranked, but will include 100 individuals in the categories of pioneers, tool smiths, trendsetters, practitioners, and enablers. I am pretty sure members of the Open Media 100 need to publish a weblog and that requirement excludes people like Ward Cunningham or John Doerr. I think Dave Sifry and Joi Ito…
Why does Technorati's search page paginate through 11 result pages when other search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Ask Jeeves all use 10? Nigel Tufnel of Spinal Tap explains it best in this clip shown below. When you're at 10 where can you go from there? If we need that extra push over the cliff we go to 11. Especially for the all-important presence amplifier.
We would like to bring together the community to reflect on the last few months in the world of weblogs and discuss how Technorati may be of service in the future…. Please RSVP to salon-sf@technorati.com and let us know how many people you are bringing so we can plan the event space, food, and drink.
I just finished editing the audio of David Sifry's talk at the February meeting of 106 Miles, a networking group for entrepreneurial engineers in Silicon Valley.
Glenn Reynolds: "If I had a big organization, like say if I ran The New York Times or some piece of it, I would pay somebody — and you wouldn't have to pay them a lot, it's not very hard — to just plug the URL for every New York Times story into Technorati which will then give you a list of every blog that links to that story and see what people say. And if you find a bunch of people saying there's a mistake in it, I'd run a correction *snap* just like that and I'd credit somewhere on the website the blogs that pointed it out.
Last Friday I took some photographs of the Technorati office space to share with our community. We are located in what used to be a printing press building. What a perfect location blogging company! We even have a printing press in our building lobby. Enjoy!…
I have only been at Technorati for one day but we already have two new features I am proud to talk about. If you have an API key you can now receive a RSS feed containing the latest weblog posts with a given tag using TagQuery. Our tags page is now more compliant with web standards through the use of lists and emphasis elements. Tantek posted about the decisions behind his changes to the page's markup. It has been interesting to see all the different uses of tags from companies interested in being included in Technorati's tags pages. If you…
Technorati opened up their tag API for anyone to query for posts associated with a tag. The query currently only returns Technorati's own XML. Some other API changes now live: You can choose to not receive claimed weblog data for cosmos and search queries by setting the claim parameter to 0. Search query now has a limit parameter to allow for selective browsing. Cosmos query has a highlight parameter to highlight the anchor text within the excerpt….
Starting Tuesday, February 1, I will start a new job as Community Manager at Technorati. I will be responsible for helping the world understand Technorati's service offerings and providing developers with the tools they need to build and extend Technorati. I will help make your voices heard and build new features to strengthen the links we create while consuming and producing content. I am excited to be working with a team of smart and passionate people. Technorati is not the only company competing to be your live search destination and keep you informed of the latest happenings in the areas…
This week's announcements from Technorati have been mixed with endorsements and a message that Technorati may work better with one weblog platform than another. The Technorati tags help file contains an inline advertisement for TypePad. I could understand the use of Flickr and del.icio.us as the current most prominent uses of tags by the online community, but endorsing a weblog hosting company in your help file stinks of paid placement. Adding rel="tag" to any link should be enough to build a tag library for links off the link text. Technorati instead grabs the last part of the URL after the…
Technorati launched Technorati Tags, a new, decentralized method of categorizing posts that also integrates with popular online communities del.icio.us and Flickr. Browse tags The front page displays a sampling of current popular tags sorted by UTF value. A tag's popularity is expressed through font size: the more popular tags appear larger. Tag page Each tag has a page aggregating photos from Flickr, weblog posts indexed by Technorati, and del.icio.us links. Each page contains ten photographs, twenty posts, and fifteen links. http://www.technorati.com/tag/ + tag of your choice (no spaces) . Join the game of tag How can you be sure your…
I have more referral traffic this week from the Technorati Developer's Contest page than domestic Google and Yahoo! combined! Ranchero has about a third as many referrals as Technorati. Technorati released some new features this week but holding off on the announcement draws more attention to my work. Thanks!…
Technorati now supports site search as a beta feature. Pass the "from" parameter in your URL string with your desired base URL and you can restrict your search to just those references. Technorati also has a searchlet for home page integration. As an example you can search my weblog for the keyword "technorati."…
Just spotted on Adam Hertz's blog links to Technorati tag URLs. The syntax is http://www.technorati.com/tag/ + keyword. Adam added a Technorati tag and a contest tag for a recent entry. A sign of things to come from Technorati? Could be a decentralized del.icio.us. Adam is Technorati's VP of Engineering. A Technorati cosmos search for the base URL shows Adam is the only known source using the tag links. Kevin is playing along too, this time with a subdomain….
I wrote an AppleScript for NetNewsWire that allows a user to subscribe to the Technorati cosmos for any individual item within NetNewsWire. Users now have a quick and easy way of staying informed about the latest information related to items of interest from the convenience of NetNewsWire. You do not even have to be online to subscribe to the cosmos! This code is the second AppleScript I have ever written — the first was to export my feeds as OPML and FTP the to my server. I almost did not submit it to the Technorati developers' contest but I won…
