According to San Francisco based Technorati, the leading search tool and authority for blogs, there are “over 175,000 new blogs (that’s just blogs) every day. Bloggers update their blogs regularly to the tune of over 1.6 million posts per day, or over 18 updates a second.” Technorati currently tracks 62.5 million blogs. In fact, Technorati has probably already tracked its 100 millionth blog.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. So how do you get your 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 and Technorati will pick up these tags when it spiders (or web crawls) your site.
There are a lot of features in Technorati, including:
- the ability to search for keywords in blog posts,
- the ability to search for entire blog posts that have been tagged with a certain keyword
- the ability to limit a search by language
- the ability to search for blogs that have been registered and tagged as whole blogs about a certain subject (like photography or libraries).
Assignment:
1. Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for “School Library Learning 2.0” in blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different?
2. Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?
