#14 Getting not-so-technical with Technorati

So now that you’ve been blogging for awhile, you might be wondering just how big the blogosphere is. Well, according to Technorati, the leading search tool and authority for blogs, they are currently tracking more than 70 million weblogs, and around 120,000 new blogs are created worldwide daily (from The State of the Live Web, April 2007)


Technorati has been tracking blogs for about 4 years now, and recently began tracking other social media web content such as video, photos and audio. Their annual The State of the Blogosphere report has grown into the The State of the Live Web report, which states that this year there has been "explosive growth" in the use of tags and that tagging has "become a phenomenon."

Yes, these numbers are astounding, but as you’ve already seen for yourselves, blogging is so easy that these publishing tools are being taken advantage of by almost every industry, including libraries.

So how does a person get their blog listed as part of the blogosphere and how can you tag your posts with keywords to make them more findable through a Technorati search? The answer to the first question is that your blog is probably already being captured by Technorati due to the fact that you're already using Blogger, the most popular blogging tool. But if you want to join the party and have your blog officially listed on Technorati and also take advantage of the watchlist and other features, you’ll need to claim your blog yourself. As for tagging posts with Technorati tags? This is easy, too. All you need to do is add a little bit of HTML code to the bottom of your post (see our example below) and Technorati will pick up these tags when it spiders (or web crawls) your site.

There are a lot of new features that have been added to Technorati this past Spring, from a major website overhaul that includes the expansion into other social content as mentioned earlier, to nifty new widgets. With Technorati, you can search for keywords in either a particular blog, all blogs, or subject-oriented blogs (like photography or libraries).

Discovery Resources:

• Read the blog post about Technorati's new features (helpful even if you didn't use the "old" Technorati.

• Take a look at Technorati's Searching info (there is also a Blogging Basics section that may be helpful).

Discovery Exercise:

1. Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search in the EXACT phrase box for “Learning 2.0” in "All Blogs." Look at a few items you found in the search result list.

2. Then go back to the search page and search for "Learning 2.0" in the Tag Search and Blog Directory Search (they have their own search boxes farther down the page). Are the results different?

3. Explore the most Popular page (don't forget to scroll all the way down to see popular videos too) . Is anything interesting or surprising here?

3. Create a blog post about your discoveries on this site.

4. Whether or not you do the optional exercise below, be sure to check out the oulibraries tag in Technorati to see what has been found by the Technorati web crawlers.

OPTIONAL: If you're up for a challenge, learn how to tag your posts with Technorati tags so they can be found in tag searches

Note: Blogger and other major blog software does this automatically when you add the "label" oulibraries to a post (some blogs call these tags or categories), but here is how it works if you wanted to do it yourself:

• Create a post in your blog about something related to libraries.
  
• Switch to the "Edit HTML" tab and add the HTML code as instructed on this page to the bottom to tag it as "oulibraries" Do this by writing in the tag oulibraries instead of [tagname]
• you may also want to consider claiming your blog and creating a watchlist or setting up favorites.

Check out the things tagged oulibraries in Technorati! oulibraries