When a person begins a blog, there has long been a list of do’s and don’ts. One of the dos was to establish your authority on Technorati, a website that indexes, or catalogs, the numerous posts that exist on the internet. While Technorati is not the powerhouse it once was, having been pushed aside by Google Blog Search and other search engines, but it still deserves a look as an element of social media.  Think of your favorite topics to discuss or read about. Then think about your best friends’ favorite topics. For each topic there are, at minimum, tens of blogs written, and more likely, hundreds or maybe even thousands. How would you ever find the blogs let alone the best blogs on the topic without a tool like Technorati?

Features

Signing up for Technorati is very easy. To get started all you need is a user name, an email address and a password. After receiving a confirmation email, enter the remaining information on your profile, including your picture. During the set-up process, you will be given the opportunity to claim your blog. Why would you want to do this? First of all, this allows you to establish that you own the blog and helps Technorati to improve your visibility.

Another feature of Technorati is the concept of authority. Authority most simply is the number of unique blogs have linked to your site in the last six months. It is through the authority rating that the List of the Top 100 blogs is created. Everyone has goals, right? How would you work on achieving your goal of getting into the Top 100? Technorati offers this advice:

“The best way to increase your Technorati Authority is to write things that are interesting to other bloggers so they’ll link to you. Linking to source material when you blog is also a great way to engage in conversation and help others find what you find interesting.”

Search

Technorati allows you to claim not only your blog, but also video, news and pictures, anything with an RSS Feed. Using Technorati’s search function, you can search for all of these forms of media. In the basic search box on the home page, put in a keyword and this will bring up all of the blogs that contain that keyword or that has a tag with that word. You can use the categories you used in your blog for your tags, but it does require a bit of coding. As discussed in an earlier post, tags are useful, but can also exclude a post from a search (see What is Social Bookmarking?)

The search results can be enormous due to the number of blogs indexed on Technorati, but you can filter the search by fields such by the type of format you want to search (posts, blogs, video or photos), the entire post or tags, by authority rating, and language. As with any search, each filter you add decreases the number of results you will see.

Widgets

There are a number of widgets that you can add either to your browser, or to your blog, that will improve the functionality of Technorati for you. I easily dragged a couple to my Firefox browser and it was equally simple in Internet Explorer. Some other applications require adding code to your blogging software, and, again, this is quite simple. You can find some widgets and applications for your blog here.

My Thoughts

My experience with Technorati has left me with the feeling that I am no longer deeming it essential to my life. Yes, it gives you almost limitless access to posts on the internet; however, how many posts can you look at and appreciate? Of course, the authority rating, in theory should be useful,  but I do not know if that is a valid tool. It does not indicate that you are a verified authority on a subject, but that others like what you are writing and are linking to it. In September 2008, Mashable’s Rob Diana noted that Technorati had been down for 12 hours the week before and hardly anyone noticed. How about you? Have you used Technorati as a site to find a blog or to check your authority? Would you notice if Technorati  was down for 12 hours? What do you prefer to use to search for posts on the internet?