Shout if you want to be heard or Technorati blog finder

For all the unhappy ones: Technorati performance and scalability improvement progress and Technorati blog finder (via David Sifry).

Things to know:

1. You have to categorise your weblog manually:

By default, the blogs are presented in order of authority, which means highly-linked blogs appear first. So each of these Blog Finder pages is like a mini Top 100 for any topic you can imagine. You can also sort each tag by how recently the blogs have updated, or alphabetical by title.

And for all you bloggers out there, this is a great opportunity for your blog to get found. If you’re already a Technorati member with a claimed blog, all you have to do is visit your Configure Blog page to choose which tags you want to use. You can add up to 20 tags per blog.

2. It’s prepopulated based on existing tags:

We kicked off the Blog Finder by auto-classifying blogs based on the tags they use in posts most often. But you can list your blog under any tag you like, up to 20.

Of course I went to check for my weblog and didn’t find it under KM, “knowledge management” and “learning”. Not surprising since I don’t really use Technorati tags (necessary mark-up is not produced by LiveTopics and I’m too lazy to add tags manually next to adding topics).

Clearly that those users who don’t know or don’t care about tagging especially for Technorati are out of the system (which reinforces “shout if you want to be heard” behavior with all its implications).

Thoughts:

• May be some kind of extrapolation could work – if top blogs on a topic link to the specific blog frequently it could be included into the topic list.
• Wonder how tagging at post level (curent auto-classification) would intergrate with blog-level tagging that is asked for.
• If auto-classification stays (which makes sense) and continues influencing one’s inclusion into the lists – how this would influence post-level tagging (e.g. adding unnecessary tags).
• First though of spammers, but then realised that it’s more or less covered by sorting based on incoming links (of course, untill someone heavily linked in one domain starts adding tags for another domain that has nothing to do with the blog focus).

And, an example of overcoming being lazy and conforming to “shout if you want to be heard” practice Technorati+Blog+Finder :)

Archived version of this entry is available at http://blog.mathemagenic.com/2005/09/04.html#a1654; comments are here.

• Blogging about disabilities
• Blog research addict
• Visual settlements: on weblog visualisations

Tagged as: blog research, blog research tools, citedCh3