What is Technorati?

Technorati is a real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the world of web logs.  It is considered the authority in the blogosphere as it offers an interconnected and personalized venue for reading your most favored blogs.  It shows which bloggers are commanding attention, what ideas are deemed relevant by users and how fast the exchange of conversation is taking place.

You will be able to find out through Technorati how people on the internet are responding to you or your company, products, competitors, politics and other areas of interest.  The good thing about it is that all activity is monitored and indexed within minutes of posting thus providing a feedback in real-time.  Technorati permits users to have a live view of global conversations taking place in the web.

A web log or blog is basically a personal journal on the web.  Web logs are able to express unlimited subjects and opinions of an unlimited number of people writing them.  Some blogs command much influence due to its vast readership.  Blogs of these natures can actually define the future of any product or service.  There are also blogs that are intended only for family and friends.

Web search has long been revolutionized by the idea that the relevance of a site is determined by the number of other sites that link to it.  Hyperlinks are very significant in the world of blogs.  Technorati tracks the number of links as well as the perceived relevance of blogs including real-time nature of blogging.  Due to the fact that Technorati automatically receives notification from web logs as soon as they are updated, it is able to track the thousands of updates occurring in the blogosphere.  In this way, it is able to monitor who is linking to whom.

Web logs have allowed millions of people to bring out their ideas and many more to react on them.  Blogs are like conversations, where internet users are active participants.  They are no longer passive consumers of information as they read, write and comment on blogs.

Technorati competes with the likes of Google and Yahoo! and has indexed over 40 million web logs as of May 2006.  It was founded by Dave Sifry and has its headquarters based in San Francisco, California, USA.  It uses and contributes to open-source software as Sifry is a major open-source advocate.

Technorati Tags

A Technorati tag is a keyword or category used to describe the subject or topic of a blog post.  It is very much similar to the tags used to label photos at Flickr and the tags used in categorizing bookmarked web pages at Furl and Del.icio.us.  The use of Technorati facilitates not only a view of its pages for a particular tag but also pictures and links to web pages having the same tag as the users of Flickr, Furl and Del.icio.us.  This is possible because of Technorati’s hook up to these sites.

The choice of tag is not in any way limited.  A blog post can be tagged with anything the user chooses.  The option to make up a tag which is previously non-existent is even possible.  Tags on Technorati are not case-sensitive so it doesn’t really matter whether you choose capital letters or lower-case letters.

Technorati has its general tag page containing a list of its major tags which are essentially the most popular ones.  The more posts, photos etc. that have been tagged to a tag word, the bigger is its font size.  You should determine how this popularity can be adopted to your own posts to ensure more visitors.  It is possible to have more than one tag for a post.

Bookmarkers can be customized for meblogging.  This is one aspect where Technorati tags are of use.  If you want to see all your posts in one place after posting several blogs, you can tag each of them with a unique identifying word to enable Technorati tag page to pull all your posts together.  A tag can also be used to collect together a group of related blogs on the same general topic, all in the same page.  This is possible through decentralized group blogging where concerned bloggers cooperate and agree to use the same unique tag.

There are two possible downsides of Technorati.  One is the possible confusion while the other is possible abuse.  Emphasis is put on the word possible as it is not always the case.  Confusion may arise from the very freedom of people in choosing whatever words they like for a specific concept.  Words may have different meanings for different people.  There is no standard classification which allows people to make up their own categories or keywords as they go along.  Add to this the absence of any exact way of figuring out how categories of keywords are recognized in different people’s head.

Abuse comes in the form of tag spamming where sites overload their web pages with keywords that are not in any way connected to their subject matter.  These are done just to draw traffic and tend to bury legitimate stuff.  Although Technorati does not allow this practice, finding it out is not done as early as it should.

Aside from Technorati tracking 40 million web blogs, the blogosphere continues to double in size at an average of every 5 months.  A new web log is created at least every second of everyday with almost 14 million bloggers still posting 3 months after their blogs are created.  Sophisticated spam management tools have eliminated most spams and have determined that about 10% of new blogs are spam or machine generated.

A Technorati ranking relates to the number of sources that point to a particular web log relative to other web logs.  Ranking becomes higher as more sources reference a web log.  You need to become a member and claim your web log to know the Technorati ranking of your own blog.

Once you claim your web log, your profile information will appear together with your photo or image next to all the searches involving your web log, if you so desire.  People will learn more about you and discover blogs which you authored.  Your profile information is completely within your control and is governed by the Privacy Policy.  Another way to register your site with Technorati is by adding your blog to Technorati’s Priority Index.  This would ensure that your updates, new entries and content are indexed efficiently and with priority by Technorati’s search technology.