Technorati has launched a new service – Blog Finder – a way of not only finding blog posts on particular topics but also blogs themselves. In effect this is a step towards the Niche Top Blog Lists that I mentioned a week or so back. Of course it won’t be a top blog list of every blog in the wider blogging community as blogs need to register themselves for categories or have their blogs set up in a way that automates it – but its a step closer to more topical top blog lists.
I’d recommend that bloggers take a few minutes to register their blogs and add themselves to their relevant categories.
There are some weird discrepancies. WizbangBlog.com, a conservative political blog, is currently #1 in the “Parenting niche”. I asked owner Kevin Aylward about this, and he said it’s because they have a parenting category, and Technorati conflates categories and tags. So it’s a nice step forward, but it’s not quite there yet.
I wonder if they could integrate some kind of reasonability matrix. E.g., if you’re a top blog for X, but fewer than 5% of the other X blogs point to you, it could drop your ranking. Right now rankings are based solely on Technorati unique inbound links. And we know how accurate *those* are.
I think this can be most effectively accomplished by manually supervised aggregation. I’m guessing that Technorati’s Blog Finder could be manipulated by spammers pretty easily.
We’ve been running a niche aggregator at Houseblogs.net for nine months now with nice success…118 member blogs, with many turned away as spam/commercial content. Quality isn’t a problem because we supervise membership and have strict content requrements, resulting in a user experience that consistently delivers on the relevant topic.
I just tagged my blogs this past weekend and have already gotten a decent number of hits from Technorati. When I went back to add more tags the other day, the system wouldn’t let me. One of my blogs is also still labeled “in progress” despite it being in the system for a few weeks already. Technorati is far from perfect for all its renown.
The fact that it lets you edit your tags is a big plus. My original blog has a category of “Politics: US” and Technorati uses that as an automatic tag, complete with the semicolon. I was able to edit that to “Politics US” so that people might actually find the blog. (Not that they will, considering how deep it’ll be buried in that particular category.)
And Darren, I think you broke Technorati sending us all there. I was able to do a couple of things and then got a message that they were getting too many requests at once. With great power comes great responsibility. :)
So, I accidently registered my blog with a typo in it. I’ve tried to fix it about 10 times, every time I do, I get an error report. I’ve sent multiple emails to them but I have never heard back.
[…] Technorati have recently introduced a new search called Blog Finder. Users can not only search for blog posts but also blog sites. If you are interested in adding your blog to the service you will need to select appropriate categories. You may want to read the comments from Darren Rowse at Pro Blogger for some feedback. […]