Technorati was a service that was popular with “hard core” bloggers when it first came out. And like many bloggers I was one of the first to use it. Still do today in fact.
It soon gained international attention with its quarterly “State of the Blogosphere“ reports, beginning in 2004. Now it claims to track over 75 million blogs.
Back then it was a leader in blogging technology – from widgets to pinging, Technorati had it covered.
But is Technorati as relevant and useful to bloggers today?
First let’s talk about the state of the blogosphere. The following image illustrates what Technorati monitors:
They also track new blogs created per day:
The pictures are cool but why use Technorati?
In case you haven’t already figured it out, Technorati is considered one of THE sources for blog information on the web. With over 75 million blogs being tracked you know they above anyone else know blogs.
That means people looking for information from blogs, or about blogs, tend to turn to Technorati.
How to use Technorati
At the very least, bloggers should be pinging Technorati when there’s an update to your blog. This gets your new entry listed in Technorati usually within a few minutes.
For example, I’ve found my new blog entries in Technorati in as little as 8 minutes. Compare that to ½ hour with Google, and hours with Yahoo.
To ping them you can either do it manually with their Ping page, or by configuring your blog to do it automatically
Of course if you want to use Technorati for more, they have a bunch of widgets and APIs you can either integrate into your blog, or use yourself to see how other blogs do in Technorti.
Technorati Browser Buttons:
With these buttons you can access Technorati from any website. The buttons can show you who is linking to the page you are on, find out more information about the blog you are on, allow you to favorite it, or even generate tags based on the content on the page.
Speaking of tags. Technorati was one of the first sites to use tagging of blog posts. They still do today.
Tagging allows you to better categorize your own posts so that when someone searches for a topic, your site could be displayed for that search, based on the tags you’ve assigned to your posts.
Of course Technorati also has a tag cloud widget which you could install on your site:
With this top tags widget you can easily display all your site’s top tags as a tag cloud. Simply copy a couple lines of code into your site and it will generate a tag cloud for your site based on the tags you use.
The tag cloud takes a few minutes to generate the first time, but once Technorati knows about the widget on your site they will update it as you add new tagged posts.
Technorati has a similar tag cloud (see below) that you can install which shows the top tags across all Technorati listed sites.
What’s Hot searches
With this widget you can display what the top searches on Technorati are. There is also a “top tags” widget which creates a tag cloud similar to the one above, but instead of using your tags it uses the most used tags found on Technorati.
There are also a host of other widgets including a count of sites linking to yours, an authority measurement and more.
Should bloggers use these?
For the most part I’d say there is value in using Technorati widgets for a variety of reasons.
For example, listing your tags in a tag cloud allows users to see at a glance what your site is about. This is especially handy for new visitors.
Widgets like the link count and authority number help show users that your site is a well known and trusted site – the higher the number of links (or higher authority number) the better your site is. Plus if regular visitors come back to see the number rising they will think more of your site.
At the very least you should be pinging Technorati whenever you update. This helps get your blog listed and searchable on Technorati. Adding the widgets and other gadgets helps show that your blog is a “web 2.0” blog. When combined with other online widgets they can provide a very pleasurable browsing experience for your site visitors.
