Part 3: Social Bookmarking and Aggregating - Avoiding overload

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Founded by Dave Sifry, Technorati started life as a real-time blog search engine but has since evolved to incorporate other forms of user generated content including images and videos. At the latest count, Technorati finds itself tracking over 100 million blogs and 250 million pieces of tagged Social Media. Internationally it is THE blog aggregator and an essential tool for anyone who operates online.

Technorati’s core is a tag-based index that allows users to do searches on topics that interest them. Contributors are able to tag their individual posts – the better tagged a post, the better chance it has of being picked up by a relevant search. This narrower and more specific tagging of each post allows for users to find content that interests them regardless of the source. Instead of contributors being separated into categories it is the content of each individual post that is indexed.

Technorati doesn’t just search the blogs of subscribed members though – it also operates as a normal search engine.

Features

Tagging of entries allows for specific searches relevant to the content of each post. By clicking on the tags of a post a visitor can then explore similar entries from other users.
he “Watchlist” feature allows you to continuously track for certain items.
Quarterly State of the Blogosphere reports analyse the latest trends on the blogosphere. Some examples of feedback that this provides include graphs on the number of blogs currently present, the number of new blogs per day, daily posting volumes, comparison of blogs’ popularity versus the mainstream media etc.
The favourites feature lets users keep track of their favourite blogs by effectively tagging them into categories. Clicking on a tag will then only show the relevant posts from a user’s favourite blogs.
Where’s the Fire? Shows what topics are generating a lot of buzz and provides a short blurb explaining that buzz.

Bloggers constantly comment and link to one another’s blogs. This results in hundreds of thousands of updates every day. Technorati indexes these updates and monitors them, giving a better understanding of the relevance and authority of specific user generated content. Technorati is simple to use and is a tool that can not be ignored by anyone wanting to make best use of Social Media.

Getting Going

Signing up to Technorati is a straightforward process. The registration form basically only asks for a name, username, password and email address. “Claiming your blog” is the next step that lets Technorati know that the blog you submit is in fact your own. If your blog is hosted on Blogger or Typepad then this is done automatically. If it’s not then you can copy the code provided and paste it into your blog template, blogroll or blog links.

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