wayne on May 12, 2008
I recently added the 'Add this blog...' Technorati widget to my blog to allow others to favorite my blog should they choose to. I tried explaining to some non-blogging friends of mine what Technorati is, and realized that many of us day-to-day programmers don't know what most of these social bookmarking/web sites are and why or how we should use them. I'm not even sure I understand the full scope of Technorati, so I'm going to find out the only way I know how, by diving right into it.
My friends gave a great idea for what will be my first official post series. All this week and perhaps a bit of next week I'll be taking a deep look at Technorati.com and try to break down into simple terms what the site provides to web users.
What is Technorati?
From their site, Technorati is described as:
...the leading monitor of the world of weblogs. Technorati is a real-time search engine that is the largest source of fresh information about the global and local conversations going on all across the Web. Technorati allows you to find out what people are saying about you, your company, your products, your competitors, your politics and, other areas of interest, on the Internet in real time.
In layman's terms, Technorati catalogs and indexes blogs and news sites from across the Internet. Blogger's are able to add their blogs into Technorati by creating an account and then supplying their blog information. Technorati will then grab your web site RSS feed to obtain everything you want syndicated.
Technorati Indexing
You might be well aware that Google sends out a spider to crawl and gather information and content on your site. Technorati on the other hand obtains your site feed to perform their indexing. Depending on how your blog is established determines how much content you provide to Technorati. Technorati recommends using an ATOM feed to work with them, however they also support RSS.
When a new post is written and posted to a blog, Technorati can be 'pinged' to let Technorati know there is new content for it to grab and index. Pinging is simply the act of letting Technorati know there is new content. You need to have the ping address, which looks like a standard HTTP URL, to be able to ping Technorati. Most, if not all, blogging packages have a Ping administration area where you can enter in Technorati's ping address.
There seems to be some talk about the ping server going up and down recently.
Conclusion thus far
Technorati provides a valuable service for blogger's that want to get their content out to the masses. With all blogging packages providing the services Technorati requires, every blog should be able to work with their service and be indexed.
Going Forward
In the upcoming posts this week I'll be looking into the following aspects of Technorati:
- Integrating Technorati widgets and services into your browser and blog
- Exploring the services provided by the Technorati web site
- Using tags effectively with Technorati
- Exploiting Technorati to promote your blog
That's probably just a preview of things to come, and not necessarily everything we'll be looking at.
If you are already a member of Technorati, please Favorite me to keep me honest. While I'm also learning more and more about Technorati services every day, it would be nice to have someone more in the know keeping things straight should I miss the mark. After all, I'm only human right?
If you are not a member but are interested in what they have to offer, sign up and let's favorite each other. We can take a look at what happens when we do that and I'll draw up a post on it.
