Tag: technorati

Blogging, Search Engines, Technology

Technorati resurrects the Marquee tag…

Technorati have overhauled their site completely. Some of the changes are great and some we could do without, frankly!

The best change is that they have drastically sped up the site. I dunno did they add more servers or simply optimise their queries (I suspect the latter) but the site and particularly searches are now running a whole lot faster.

The next great change is that they have moved the blog searches to a page of its own. You can now find blog searches at s.technorati.com. The searches return relevant results and make subscribing to searches a whole lot easier than heretofore.

On the downside, on the main Technorati page they have a scrolling bar of tags along the top – make it stop! I thought we had killed of the Marquee tag people!!!

New Technorati homepage

Overall, the new design seems to be getting the thumbs up from most reviewers. This can only be good as with the rollout of Google’s excellent Blogsearch tool, reasons for using Technorati were becoming fewer and fewer.

Blogging, office 2.0, Photo Sharing, Podcast, PodLeaders, RSS, Web, Web 2.0

Your top Web 2.0 apps?

If we ignore the fact that the term Web 2.0 is controversial for all kinds of reasons and concentrate on the applications themselves, which Web 2.0 apps (using the broadest possible definition) do you use most?

I use:

  1. my blog and podcast software all the time (they are run out of WordPress)
  2. my Flickr account regularly to post photos
  3. Google’s Docs and Spreadsheets frequently for collaboration or sharing of documents
  4. Google’s Calendar to synch with my laptop and mobile phone calendars
  5. Technorati, PubSub and Google’s Blogsearch to subscribe to RSS searches
  6. Flock as my main browser of choice (primarily because of the Flickr and Del.icio.us integration) – I also use Firefox, Camino, Safari and IE7
  7. Feedburner to burn and track my feeds
  8. NetNewsWire, Google Reader and iTunes to consume my feed list
  9. TechMeme, Megite and TailRank for keeping up with tech news
  10. Del.icio.us very occasionally to store URLs for items I have found interesting

What cool Web 2.0 apps am I not using that I should be using? What are your favourite Web 2.0 apps?

Blogging, Search Engines, Web 2.0

Google Blogsearch adds ping

Thanks to Niall Kennedy for pointing out Google’s new ping service.

This is great – one of the biggest problems I had with Google’s blogsearch was how slow it was to pick up on posts. Several hours after posting an article, typically it still wasn’t up on Google whereas the post is often up on Technorati within minutes.

You can manually ping Google’s Blogsearch here or alternatively you can add the following address to your blog platform to automate the ping (in WordPress add it Options -> Writing -> Update Services)

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping

For more see the Google Blog Search ping FAQ

Technology

Do you search the future?

I did a small bit of blog and social media consultancy for Roam4Free yesterday and it still never ceases to amaze me how few people are aware of prospective search.

Prospective searching is the ability to search the future. It is the ability to enter a search term in a search engine and say tell me whenever someone writes about x. The likes of Technorati watchlists make prospective searching really easy to do.

Yesterday, I helped the lads in Roam4Free set up prospective searches for the term Roam4Free (as well as a few other relevant terms) so today this post should have landed in their RSS reader automatically, simply because I mentioned their company name in the post. Hi guys!

If you want to keep on top of what is being said about you, your company, your products, your competitors, their products, and/or your market you should be searching the future.

Search Engines, Technology

Brief blog search engine review

I have been trying a number of blog search engines recently.

I have subscribed to searches for the same terms in Technorati, Ice Rocket, PubSub and Sphere.

Sphere is the newest player on the blog search engine block, only coming out of beta last weekend. The search is adequate – I searched for “technorati blocked by China“, a story I broke here and was heavily linked to and quoted as a result, but my post on this is not found by Sphere. The searches I subscribed to using Sphere again didn’t return as many results as the other search engines and did contain some spam!

PubSub produced the lowest number of results of the four compared and often the results were late i.e. they were found by the other search engines much earlier (often days earlier).

Ice Rocket produced by far the most results of any of the search engines but those results were full of spam – finding the real information amongst the spam was difficult!

And Technorati was still the best of the four. Very timely results and very little spam.

Conclusion
It is always advisable to use more than one blog search engine for subscribed searches. In this scenario I would advise using Technorati and Sphere. Although Sphere doesn’t yet have as many results as the others, it does appear to be improving.

Also, I had an issue with Sphere earlier in the week so I contacted the CEO, Tony Conrad – he replied to my email and had Steve Nieker the CIO follow up – it is great to see companies getting directly in touch with their users in this way.

Ice Rocket needs to seriously address the spam problem it has and PubSub, I’m sorry to say, looks like it is no longer at the races.

Interviews, Podcasting

Any Questions for Niall Kennedy

Niall Kennedy is a well known blogger, a vertical search veteran, a podcaster (with Om Malik) on the Om and Niall podsessions podcast, and a soccer coach! I will be interviewing Niall tomorrow (Fri 21st) in the late afternoon (sorry for the late notice – I only just got confirmation) for a podcast on PodLeaders.com.

Niall has worked for Technorati, shopping comparison engines PriceGrabber and NexTag, institutional investment search company Callan Associates, and business services search for American Express.

Most recently, Niall has accepted a job working for Microsoft’s Windows Live Division.

And most importantly, Niall is the proud holder of an Irish passport!

As always, if you have any questions that you’d like me to ask him, feel free to leave them in the comments or emil them to me at tom@tomrafteryit.net.

Blogging, Business blogging

Do you still think blogging is a fad?

I see Dave Sifry (who I interviewed on PodLeaders.com a couple of weeks ago) has published a new quarterly State of the Blogosphere.

Dave’s main findings are that the blogosphere is still doubling in size every 6 months – so it is maintaining its rate of virtually exponential growth. The blogosphere is over 60 times bigger than it was only 3 years ago.

The main points to note are:

  • Technorati now tracks over 35.3 Million blogs
  • On average, a new weblog is created every second of every day
  • Technorati tracks about 1.2 Million new blog posts each day, about 50,000 per hour and, most interesetingly,
  • 19.4 million bloggers (55%) are still posting 3 months after their blogs are created

Do you still think blogging is a fad?

Search Engines, Web 2.0

Technorati tag search broken?

I did a couple of tag searches on Technorati this afternoon – but they came up empty – I wasn’t so surprised with one or two of the more obscure ones I tried but when my search for the tag Google came up with the following message:

There are no posts with that tag yet. Please try again later or post one yourself! To contribute to this page, just post to your blog and include this code

I began to suspect there Technorati may be having some technical issues!

Technorati tags broken