DavidBreyer.Com

http://www.technorati.com

When I ask people about this site, they are always confused to what it is. So I am going to give you my explaination of Technorati.

Technorati is simply a search engine for blogs. It’s kind of like Google, but the content is updated more often. In fact, after I publish this blog post, a ping will be sent to Technorati.com tell them my page is updated. Technorati will then index my new post. Without getting into the underlying details, this ping is done by specifying “http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping” under Update Services in my Wordpress options.

In order to have Technorati index your site, you will have to first claim your blog. Sign up for an account. In Member Tools, click claimed weblogs, enter the URL (web address) of your site. It will then give you HTML to put on your site. Once Technorati sees you updated your site with the specified HTML, it will know that is indeed your blog. When I did this, it took a day or two to actually say I claimed my blog. So you have to be patient.

Once your blog is claimed, you can then (sorry I only know Wordpress, check your blogs instructions) specify “http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping” in your Update Services. Everytime you publish a post, this will tell Technorati that your site needs to be indexed. You can also do a manual ping here. This updating on your schedule is why it’s called the real-time web.

There are two ways to search Technorati. You can either specify a tag or keywords (i.e. works like a standard search engine). Typing in words like “Cincinnati” or “Bruce Campbell” will search the entire text of an article. Just like Google. But where the real genius of Technorati is, is in tags. Typing in “tag:Cincinnati” or “tag:Bruce Campbell” will give you only articles (and pictures from flickr.com and links from furl and del.icio.us) regarding that tag. A tag in Wordpress is simply a category, which you can specify multiple categories per post. You can also specify a tag with HTML only.

So if you want to increase your blog exposure or if you want to monitor what’s going on in blogosphere. Technorati is your solution.

For anyone who has ever seen the 1966 Batman movie and laughed over the ridiculous signs hanging around the Batcave this one’s for you. It appears “tagging” is now all the rage and promises to liberate us from having to sort through too much data. Most tagging involve social networks, such as del.icio.us, 43 Things, Flickr, and Technorati.

Some offline applications have also introduced tagging, namely the Adobe Photo Album. Hopefully one day more tagging applications will be available to tag everything on our PC, from email to Word documents. In the meantime I will be going around the office affixing signs to everything, “Bat-Watercooler”, “Bat-Printer”, “Bat-Web Server” ….