Now Updated
This Really Is How TO Get OPML For Google Reader

For full details see the second half of this article

This isn’t a typical “how To” article, because currently this feature doesn’t exist, but it could with just a little 20% time at Google.

Whilst you can download an OPML file to import into other feed readers, or to upload to the web in another location, you can’t currently access it directly.

Whilst many tech sites are lauding the new blogroll for Google Reader users, it isn’t really very useful, and is without doubt extremely ugly compared to many widgets that use OPML, such as SpringWidgets, or even a work-around previously available.

The Key To OPML With Google Reader

It isn’t some secret hidden interface, but a person, Steve Lacey who created the widget blogroll in his 20% time at Google.

All you need to do is impress upon him that you really would like to do more with your collection of feeds in Google Reader and he might be persuaded to make some small additions to his existing code.

Steve already seems to be receptive to the idea, asking open questions. All that might be required is to make him a blogging superstar with lots of links and comments ;)

Google is meant to be all about “Open” these days but whilst I think they have made some mistakes, there is a chance for one aspect of our online presence to become truly open… and useful.

If you want access to an OPML version of your subscriptions in Google Reader, directly from a server rather than having to export it, I suggest you raise your voices.

Exclusive: How To Get OPML For Google Reader

Sometimes you just have to ask for the right features at the right time, and doors open.

Mihai Parparita from the Google Reader team popped by and gave away the secret to what is currently an unannounced feature of Google Reader, that isn’t currently in the interface but can be accessed.

Actually, OPML export for blogrolls is already supported, we just couldn’t figure out where to put it in the UI. To get at it, look at an existing blogroll URL. For example, here is Steve’s:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/javascript-sub/user/06964043342831417138/label/my-feeds

To get at the OPML version, replace “javascript-sub” with “subscriptions”, giving you:

http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/06964043342831417138/label/my-feeds

Mihai Parparita
Google Reader Engineer

Expect a more extensive tutorial to be added to this story in the next few hours.

Update 2

This doesn’t seem to be quite what we are looking for.

If you access the file via a web browser, you get to download your OPML as a file google-reader-subscriptions.xml

If you access using a web application, such as a tool to check headers, you see that it is being returned as an attachment.

1. Requesting: http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/06964043342831417138/label/my-feeds
GET /reader/public/subscriptions/user/06964043342831417138/label/my-feeds HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept:*/*
Host: www.google.com
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

Server Response: 200 OK
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8
Content-Disposition: attachment;filename=google-reader-subscriptions.xml
Content-Encoding: gzip
Cache-Control: private
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:21:19 GMT
Server: GFE/1.3
X-Cache: MISS from .
Via: 1.0 .:80 (squid)
Connection: close

This doesn’t work the same way as accessing your Technorati favorites as an opml file such as http://feeds.technorati.com/faves/AndyBeard?format=opml

1. Requesting: http://feeds.technorati.com/faves/AndyBeard?format=opml
GET /faves/AndyBeard?format=opml HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept:*/*
Host: feeds.technorati.com
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

Server Response: 200 OK
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:05:33 GMT
Server: Apache
Set-Cookie: tvisitor=216.154.235.143.1194541533975889; path=/; expires=Tue, 06-Nov-12 17:05:33 GMT; domain=.technorati.com
Cache-Control: max-age=1800
Expires: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:35:37 GMT
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=UTF-8
Vary: Accept-Encoding,User-Agent
Content-Encoding: gzip
Transfer-Encoding: chunked

This isn’t the easily access OPML we are looking for

Example With SpringWidgets

Whilst the OPML will not work when creating a new RSS reader widget, you can force it to work with an existing widget.

If you just provide the OPML file direct from Google Reader, it returns an error.

Update 3

Now comparing this with Bloglines, which also returns the OPML as an attachment

http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=AndrewBeard

Here are the headers returned

1. Requesting: http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=AndrewBeard
GET /export?id=AndrewBeard HTTP/1.1
Connection: Keep-Alive
Keep-Alive: 300
Accept:*/*
Host: www.bloglines.com
Accept-Language: en-us
Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; fr; rv:1.8) Gecko/20051111 Firefox/1.5

Server Response: 200 OK
Date: Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:53:38 GMT
Server: Apache/2.2.6-dev (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.6-dev OpenSSL/0.9.7a
P3P: CP=”NOI DSP COR NID CURa ADMa DEVa TAIa PSAa PSDa OUR STP IND UNI COM NAV INT STA”
Content-Disposition: attachment;filename=export.opml
Vary: User-Agent,Accept-Encoding
Content-Encoding: gzip
Content-Length: 472
Keep-Alive: timeout=300, max=100
Connection: Keep-Alive
Content-Type: text/xml; charset=utf-8

Lets compare the XML returned

Google returns the following

<opml version="1.0">
    <head><base href="http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/06964043342831417138/label/my-feeds">
        <title>"my-feeds" subscriptions via Steve Lacey in Google Reader</title>
    </head>

Here is the Bloglines Header

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<opml version="1.1">
<head><base href="http://www.bloglines.com/export?id=AndrewBeard">
    <title>Bloglines Subscriptions</title>
    <dateCreated>Thu, 08 Nov 2007 17:58:31 GMT</dateCreated>
    <ownerName>AndrewBeard</ownerName>
</head>

Thus there is a difference in the headers being returned

If you add the following

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

You get a working OPML feed, here is an example
http://andybeard.eu/google-reader-test-opml.xml

It updates live, in a similar way to Truemors.com and various widgets such as the one for Netscape.com

Topics are split between Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life and apparently blogs have been selected based upon Technorati Authority, frequency of posting, use of relevant tags, links to related subject matter and general topicality.

In theory some of my content might appear within both the Technology and Business sections, but that remains to be seen.

Is Technorati Topics Useful?

In theory it is spam free but it is also elitist, though the bar hasn’t been set insanely high for entry. I suppose it might bring additional readers to sites who wouldn’t otherwise get noticed.
I have seen one blog with an authority of 65 appearing in the results already.

Technorati Bugs Fixed?

The Technorati Popular page is fairly broken

Apparently Guy Kawasaki has a twin, in fact he is not the only one…

I actually took these screen shots a week ago, and nothing has really changed

Automattic is now a top rated blog… huh?

Lets have a look at the quality of the posts in the feed on the Automattic blog

There are other discrepancies too, but it is really not my place to snitch on anyone. Technorati are allowed to interpret and hand edit the results just as much or maybe more than Google are, especially as they don’t have a monopoly and 10,000+ employees.

The errors I have pointed out here are the most obvious ones.

I did check to see if they have fixed the Technorati favorites for those with more than 200 – they haven’t so I can’t add or remove any.

Important Milestone For Technorati

Recently Technorati have had quite a few shake ups, with Dave Sifry dropping his CEO role (but remaining Chairman) and 8 people were also let go.
Prior to that in July Adam Hertz, Tantek Celik and Liz Dunn left whilst hiring promoting Dorion Carroll.
Corrected – see comment by Dorion in comments

By my reckoning, Technorati probably still have around 40 staff and have still to show how they are going to integrate Personal Bee which they previously acquired.

Hopefully we will start to see either existing systems fixed, or more ways we can interact and explore our favorite blogs, and make use of what is still one of the best implementations of OPML.

I think one of the problems was that Technorati created some great features that no one was really using extensively for managing OPML in interesting ways, and then with various methods of exchanging Technorati favorites, and my suggestion to import opml into Technorati favorites, the system might have become slightly overwhelmed.

If a legitimate blogger like Robert Scoble can read 100s or even 1000s of blogs, then importing 1000 blogs as favorites into Technorati shouldn’t be looked on as a bad thing, which is why I suggested doing that in the first place rather than wasting a huge amount of time running around between blogs requesting to exchange Technorati Favorites.

Over the last couple of days the Technorati Favorites and WTF were taken offline for maintenance and now there is a new message displayed.

My Favorites
We know you have a lot of favorites, we apologize that we aren’t able to show them.

There is a known bug where the favorites feature is disabled for accounts with a large number of favorites. We are currently working on this and hope to have this resolved within the next few weeks. In the meantime, you should still be able to view your tagged favorites. Please note that your favorites are not lost. They just cannot be displayed. Thus, when the fix is in place, you should be able to access your favorites again. Thanks for your patience!

It should be remembered that Technorati purchased PersonalBee back in April, and nothing currently has been done with integration.

There is no mention of what changes might be taking place, but hopefully Technorati will continue to expand the way that OPML data can be used to customize your browsing experience.

I still use the meme based upon my Technorati favorites on Megite which covers stories from over 800 blogs most of which would never appear on Techmeme.

Unfortuantely with Technorati favorites in the current state, I am not in a position to include more people in it, though as soon as they fix their Technorati favorites, I will be adding people just by reciprocating Technorati favorites.

There was previously a bit of a blogstorm over this, I am sure when the Technorati favorites system is fixed there will be another one.

OPML is meant to be used, and not just by geeks.

That is a lot of links for me in one paragraph, I already feel guilty of linking mistakes.

It is the same list, but just as Todd’s list grew from beyond 150 marketing related blogs, I am sure this list will eventually go beyond 500.

I have annotated the top50 list a little with some thoughts.

Charts like this are a measuring stick, and Daniel prepared a list based on the idea of the Power150 for both Blogging and SEO and I think I actually preferred the original look for the column headers which Daniel used.

There are some other differences between the original list Todd prepared, and those by both Adage and Daniel.

• Mouseovers – unfortunately I can’t demonstrate this to you, but when I was last writing this list I was able to guess fairly accurately how many “points” I needed from each service to attain a certain number of ranking points on Todd’s chart, because when you moved your mouse over the numbers in the chart, you could see the exact numbers being used for each grouping.
• Automatic Update – I am hoping that the Adage page is being updated automatically using Todd’s script, but I believe Daniel’s might not be. A list of this kind is a lot of hard work to maintain manually.
• Presentation – The list on Adage is getting very long, and I predict will get longer – it really needs to be segmented in some way, I would suggest a way for sites to add themselves to 3 categories out of maybe 10 in total.

Whilst I am sure the people at the top of the main list are now receiving a flood of traffic from the announcement, those on additional pages or further down the list will receive far less, though maybe a boost in subscribers from the OPML of Marketing Blogs.

p.s. I was right about those “Todd And” points. I have a feeling Todd is very partial to things which are not “search engine marketing” and “internet marketing” related, and I do still need to refine my “look”

Update

There is quite a lot of coverage of this major shift, and I love efforts to try to bring the marketing industry together collectively, though the battle will become under whose banner it should be.

I mentioned Mike Sansone in my annotation, because he is without doubt one of the greatest evangelists on the benefit of linking out to people when blogging and marketing for business.

GrokDotCom also has some coverage and has been highlighting the subjective nature of the “Todd And” rating, and highlighting their extensive multimedia marketing efforts. They did forget to mention their WordPress Split Testing plugin.

Viaspire does some smart linking out to their clients in a great show of reciprocity.

Jim Kukral shows his blog marketing expertise and highlights why Todd’s list was so successful.

John Moore welcomes his new visitors and proves he is a smart marketing blogger, loads of deep linking to his best content.
John of course ranks very highly on the chart, which is admirable for a solo blog.
The sad thing is John would rank much higher if Technorati didn’t have his links split between 2 different URLs – maybe he has enough influence to complain about it an have his voice heard.

Jeremiah from Podtech creates a list of marketing podcasts. He shouldn’t forget that there are loads of marketing podcasts on services such as Webmaster Radio and Blog Talk Radio. Yeah I still look on audio as being a podcast. If you are looking for video, I know Andy Beal has one.

Mediabistro’s “Agency Spy” has some coverage of Adage 150 even though they didn’t make the list being a new site, but at the rate they are pumping out content, I am sure that won’t be for long. I still can’t understand why they host 2 of their blogs on WordPress.com, it is so marketing unfriendly (no ads, bad tracking)

Karl questions why Technorati haven’t come up with something like this already. I agree, though they do provide lots of OPML to help you do it yourself. What Technorati would have to do is provide optional filters for those identified for gaming the system.

Topaz Partners have also written about the Power 150, though they haven’t made the list yet. I hate to say it but one of the reasons is Blogger, because it is so much harder to take part in conversations with other blogs and with your readers even if you use trackback.

What is strange is that this hasn’t made it onto Techmeme. I thought things related to blogging count as technology, and this is a mashup of data from various technology companies.

I Am Not As Productive As I Want To Be

This is painfully true, in some ways I am like a tumbleweed blown about by wind in multiple directions, and by what is typical in this day and age on the internet, information overload.
This can be especially worrying when your main source of income is from your internet activities, and you have bills to pay, and have to keep food on the table.

Defining Purpose

Unlike a tumbleweed, I always have an overall strategic goal I wish to reach. Whilst some aspects of this blog evolve over time, in reference to the content, I have defined a specific audience I wish to reach and various topics I wish to discuss, and maybe influence.
Alister Cameron heavily quoted Robert Allen, expressing the difference between goal setting, and having passion and purpose for what you do.

I might lack on the goal setting on a daily basis but I have a passion for what I do, and an overall driving purpose to my endeavours.

Any amount of daily goals you set will rarely outweigh the value in working on something you are passionate about. Reaching daily goals has the effect of a small bomb blast in a quarry, whereas passion is like the act of the sea on a cliff, or the way the rain can erode a mountain.

Criticizing Goals & Passion

Amit Agarwal has been criticising Technorati Favorite exchanges. Hundreds of people set a collective goal and are pursuing it with a passion. That isn’t a small bomb blast, it is a surge of the masses, and A-list bloggers had better get used to it.
He is factually incorrect in his statements, because exchanging Technorati favorites doesn’t affect Google Juice in any way.
If popular bloggers get displaced from the “top favorites list” by people actually utilizing the tools that Technorati spent a lot of time developing, then that is the correct thing to happen.

If Amit was actually using Technorati Favorites for any specific purpose, maybe his arguements would carry some weight, but whilst he encourages people to add him to their favorites, he has only added 8 favorites of his own.

I was exchanging Technorati favorites with my readers for almost 6 months before this “Technorati Exchange Train” gathered steam. Most of the blogs I favorited were being favorited for the very first time, or possibly the second time if they had already favorited themselves.

The Technorati meme is more Z-list than 2000 bloggers, and certainly any links I have created to people taking part have been deliberately one directional without a requirement to link back to me, and every single link was highly relevant.

Also, it is not like any of these ideas about exchanging Technorati Favorites are new. Whilst I was first doing it back in November of last year, SEOmoz was 2 months ahead of me.

Responding to Your Readers Needs

Most A-Listers only respond to their readers when a reader links to them, and pays them lots of compliments.
Even though I disagree with Jason Calacanis on many things, one thing I do respect him for is having the balls to admit how he chooses who he links to. It would be going to far to give me any credit for why he now has some disclosure on his sidebar, but most likely he will at least read this. Vanity Google Alerts are great ;)

But how do you respond to your readers needs when they don’t link to you?

I am just small fry, less than 1000 targeted subscribers, but already my feed reader, at least for me, has outgrown it’s usefulness.
When I only had 100 subscribers, I actually had most of my readers in my Feed Reader, and read every single post they made, plus a load of other feeds, including lots of A-Listers.

Through using various blogging social network tools, such as MyBlogLog, Bumpzee, and BlogCatalog I grew my readership. It was important to have content that related to my reader’s needs, so my Feed Reader continued to groan.

Feed Readers Are Not Productive

Unless you restrict your reading habits to a really small segment of the blogging population, or you are a blogging machine like Robert Scoble, a feed reader is only going to give you a small window of what is happening in the blogosphere.

One option is to leverage people like Robert Scoble who share content with Google Reader, but shared content with Google Reader also has it’s pitfalls.

Another alternative is to use meme trackers such as Techmeme or Megite.

The problem is that Techmeme is really only about the top ranking Tech blogs, although they do have sister sites for things like celebrities and politics, and even Megite only has a certain width to their standard coverage.

Custom Meme Trackers

For me the best alternative to information overload are various custom solutions that will allow me to maximise the width of my reading, whilst still being able to focus in a specific topics of interest.

I had hoped that I would be able to do something with MyBlogLog, and I hopefully will in the future, allowing me to not only browse the blogs of my readers, but also the blogs that they find most interesting.

Whilst I am writing this post, I am importing over 800 feeds into Blogrovr that I exported from my Technorati Favorites. Some of those will no doubt be duplicates from what I exported from Google Reader. It is actually causing a few technical problems, but I will be writing about that soon.

I do need to clean my OPML from my Technorati favorites a little, but for me it is actually quite a targeted list of blogs who are either my own readers, or the people who read my reader’s blogs, and are interested in blog promotion.

If you explore Technorati, there are lots of powerful things you can do with favorites. Import OPML, search your favorites, tag your favorites, grab a widget to display your favorites, or if you prefer, an RSS feed of your favorite’s most recent posts.
You can also export your OPML to use with other services. You can even grab an OPML file for a specific tag.
Whilst I recently discussed some of the things that Google Blog Search does better than Technorati, I think it is fair to say that if you want to search a specific group of blogs, Technorati offers a better search solution than building a Google Custom Search Engine, or using a community search solution using Google CSE such as Lijit. That isn’t a failing of Lijit in any way, but of how Google handle supplemental results. 95% of blogs wouldn’t appear in the results.

Megite offer a custom meme tracker, so one of my intentions once I have my Technorati favorites cleaned up is to create a custom Megite Meme based on my favorites. I already use a custom Megite meme for things relating to SEO and Marketing.

I am intrigued by PersonalBee because they have just been acquired by Technorati. How that will be integrated with Technorati and especially Technorati favorites will be fascinating, and might provide the Digg style interface Amit is looking for. It might certainly provide more relevance, which the Technorati link authority currently used in my opinion doesn’t. If you are only interested in what A-listers, blog networks and theme developers write, Technorati’s main search is just your ticket.

I also wrote about Myfeedz a couple of months ago. It didn’t really offer what I was looking for, but for someone after a really casual reading experience it might be the answer.

Bumpzee is providing a great service for custom blog tracking, although ranking is based on votes, and they also recently introduced ranking based on traffic – the most popular content for the day. Whilst I could add 100s of sites to my No Nofollow | Dofollow community, I really want people to take the initiative and sign up themselves.

My Bumpzee community is really for people who want to go beyond memes as a way of interacting with their neighbours, and start interacting with related sites that also happen to share link love.

I should also point out, and I will most likely be writing about this tomorrow, that the most powerful way to interact with a blog that supports dofollow is to link to them with a trackback, not in a meme, but in reaction to interesting related content. All this running around commenting to get a link and patting each other on the back is just silly, and isn’t very productive. Whilst the masses now adopting the “I Follow” movement and the “D-list”might not think I know WTF I am talking about, it took a good 6 months to achieve critical mass.

Comments On Other People’s Blogs Aren’t Productive

One of the things I have grown to realise is that spreading answers to problems out on 100s of blogs might have been necessary to encourage the adoption of dofollow, but it wasn’t very productive. It might have helped build critical mass, but cornerstone content that others can point to is far more useful.
In recent weeks I have actually deleted by Google alerts for terms like “Dofollow”, “Nofollow”, and “no nofollow”.

When I created my list of dofollow & nofollow plugins, I had already been evangelising using dofollow plugins for more than 3 months on this blog, and I had been using them personally for 2 years. There had been some small “storms in the teacup” over those 2 years, but no concentrated effort had made a dent in the use of nofollow on comments, even up until February of this year.
I had converted many of my readers, but there were frequent questions about nofollow on other platforms, or alternative methods of disabling nofollow. I had responded to hundreds of comments and questions relating to the use of dofollow, but that content has very little longevity.

Just an example of longterm commitment, No-Nofollow.com was registered November 3rd 2006
It wasn’t developed, because I was waiting for critical mass, and for certain plugin solutions to become available.

There are constantly questions about how using dofollow affects SEO, and they are real concerns.
Easy answer though from Adam Lasnik:-

On a related note, though, and echoing Matt’s earlier sentiments… we hope and expect that more and more sites — including Wikipedia — will adopt a less-absolute approach to no-follow… expiring no-follows, not applying no-follows to trusted contributors, and so on.

I have covered various ways to improve your internal linking structure for months. I will save linking to it all for a followup post.

The Wheel Has Fallen Off the Dofollow Movement

If you have a car trundling along it can pick up speed gradually and become a mass that is very hard to stop. If a wheel falls off it will keep on racing ahead until it loses momentum and stops, because it is no longer connected to the body that gave it energy in the first place.

The car body grinds to a halt, and maybe if there is a spare wheel, and not too much damage will get going again.

For me, personally, the wheel has fallen off the dofollow movement. The reason being there is no longer an easy trail of information people can follow to the one most important ingredient, information.

I have seen people claiming that adopting dofollow and gaining lots of comments will improve their SEO. People are running around like headless chickens commenting on each others blogs for a temporary boost in traffic and comments, working their way down long lists, and writing the exact same comment on each blog. Sure they might be having some fun doing it, but the links and most of the comments are not providing valuable information.

The links being left are invariably to the root domain, and not to related content. If people were using trackbacks linking between related content, they would be able to pick and choose their anchor text.

I Am A Link Whore

Well that is what my friend Paul thinks, and I always respect his opinion.

The big question lies in how many people were actually using Technorati favorites for any real purpose prior to the current Technorati Favorites chain.
From what I have read, top bloggers have stated that they have never seen much traffic specifically from the Technorati Favorites page. It would be hard to judge, because there is suddenly a lot more attention being drawn to Technorati Favorites.

Lets have a look at how other people are using Technorati Favorites

• David Sifry – Founder of Technorati – 76 Favorites

A good 3rd of his favorites are actually search queries, not even blogs at all, and most of the remainder are technology and marketing blogs, mainly A-listers.
It looks like David is using the service as a Feed Reader rather than a favorite being a vote for a particular blog.

• Robert Scoble – Tech Blogger – 11 Favorites

One of Robert’s favorites is his old URL on WordPress.com, so it looks like he keeps things updated. Robert is a heavy user of Technorati, thus I think this is a significant indication.

• Dave Winer – The Father of RSS and OPML- No Favorites

Maybe Dave just loves all blogs, and playing with raw OPML rather than on Technorati

• Steve Rubel – Marketing Strategist – 28 Favorites
• Michael Arrington – Techcrunch Web 2.0 Supremo – No Favorites
• Jason Calacanis – Linkbaiter – Lover of dogs, and successful media mogul both online and offline – No Favorites

Actually I am not sure whether that is actually Jason’s profile, there seems to be something broken, because although that profile has claimed calacanis.com, calacanis.com is not listed under the profile. The same profile is still listed as claiming Engadget.

• Seth Godin – Marketing Consultant and Author – No Favorites
• Michelle Malkin – Political Blogger – 21 Favorites
• Arianna Huffington – Political Blogger – 37 Blogs
• Richard MacManus – Technology Blogger – 1 Favorite

This is interesting because Alex Iskold and Emre Sokullu have both written about Technorati recently, and in particular about search and Technorati decline, and Alex even suggested people fave RWW in the post.
Alex knows all about Technorati Favorites with the 3 he currently has, 2 of them blogs he writes on, and the other is his own Technorati favorites creating an interesting, never-ending loop.
Emre however has Alex pipped, having 4 Technorati Favorites, 2 being blogs he writes for, plus Techcrunch and GigaOm

I could carry on with this list all night, and I will find very few top bloggers that are actually using the full features of Technorati to improve their blog search results.

I Am Using Technorati Favorites

It seems to me that Technorati Favorites are not being used by the majority of top bloggers, so they could have very little complaint about how anyone else decides to use them.

Technorati Favorites help my productivity, and is an easy way for people to say “Hey I am Here, Listen To Me Too”.

The amount of people I have been favoriting recently has been escalating, through use of Technorati’s OPML import feature.

Features like that are there to be used. I encourage other people to use them as well.

Obviously there is a problem with detecting when other people favorite me, and providing reciprocation that I offer willingly, because I want to see what other people are talking about.
Fortunately Engtech has come up with a solution, which uses Technorati’s API

Here is a nice quote to finish off from Engtech, in response to some negativity to the favorites exchange.

@Ilya: The thing is, the Technorati Favorites doesn’t have any meaning to start with.

The top 100 favorites is a completely arbitrary ranking that Technorati should get rid of. Before these favorite exchanges came a long *very few* people used it or had even heard of it.

Creating Passionate Users, easily one of the best blogs anyone could have read only managed to hit around 190 favorites even with including a link to “add this to Technorati favorites” prominently on every page of their blog for over a year.

All that advertisement for Technorati with what to show for it?

I like how you can use it for creating a custom blog search engine, but other than that or using it as a poor man’s RSS the feature doesn’t *do* or *mean* anything.

If it wasn’t for the attention from the favorite exchange then people *still* wouldn’t be using it.

Lets see what the value is when PersonalBee gets integrated, or people do some cool things with OPML.

I can see nothing wrong with using powerful tools provided by Technorati to help with my online productivity, and especially allowing me to monitor what my readers are talking about, so I can respond to their needs.

DoshDosh has a fair number of Technorati favorites, currently just over 440

Now in Technorati they provide an OPML file of your favorites

Here is mine for instance

http://feeds.technorati.com/faves/AndyBeard?format=opml

Hmm Maki’s would be

http://feeds.technorati.com/faves/kawaiikuma?format=opml

OPML Can Be Imported Into Your Own Technorati Favorites

Hattip to Douglas Karr for this, also via Engtech even though I am subscribed, but I am sure he didn’t think of my evil/lazy/smart intentions. I knew about it, but reading his post clicked some brain cells back into position.

So anyway first stop was to download DoshDosh’s OPML, then import it into my Technorati Favorites.

Here is a quite interesting statistic, of the 400+ favorites I added from Maki, only 46 were already in my favorites.

356 Blogs were new additions, and 26 Technorati told me were not blogs, though they obviously were.

But I already had 276 blogs in my favorites to start with – that isn’t bloggers, but actual blogs. With some people I kindly added multiple blogs to my favorites.

I am not sure whether the maths above works out, but I now have 647 Technorati Favorites.

OPML (Right Click and Save to your HD)

Click This Link To Import To Technorati

Not everyone will hear about this much faster method, so make sure you share this with your readers. I really want to save people lots of time in checking their Technorati Favorites all the time.
Also not everyone will reciprocate a Favorite – that is one of the reasons I have added an RSS feed of my favorites in the sidebar. People get picked up as the occasional link from me, and come visiting, and sometimes add me back – not always but it certainly helps.
There are lots of RSS plugins and widgets, I know they also work well on Blogspot.

It is not something I suggest everyone includes on a professional blog.

Once you get lots of favorites, it is hard work managing them, so this solution for those interested is much much faster.

It is quite possible I have missed a few people out, so make sure you favorite me, and I will post a new list in one week’s time.

Also make sure you subscribe so you can get the update when published.

There is a purpose to this, I needed an OPML file of like minded people to do some additional testing of Blogrovr. An OPML of around 200 sites just wasn’t enough, and I wanted interesting sites on varied topics, not just the search and internet marketing feeds I have in my feedreader.

You can also give Blogrovr a try using my OPML file.

One Problem I Noted

Certainly not everyone who has exchanged favorites with DoshDosh linked through to the original, post, or lots of people are not being indexed correctly by Technorati.

The list below is updated every 30 minutes, and shows the most recent 100 people who linked through to DoshDosh as far as Google are concerned. Technorati did show a lot more, but even then it was certainly 200 – 300 people short, depending on how many duplicate listings were in Technorati.

If you are not in the list below, check how your blog pings are configured, or you may have to start manually pinging using a service like Pingomatic.

!inlineRSS:doshdosh

Memes do help people build up links, but the best way to build up links is to write quality content that other people will link to… like this.

Ok I should really qualify that statement… I am listed under “A” on the TopRank Online Marketing list of SEO related blogs.

What I also know is that while compiling the list, Lee really does spend some time reading the blogs listed. I have noticed him on my MyBlogLog recent visitors list, but also within their tracking.

I actually knew I was going to be included on the list this time round yesterday, without Lee telling me.

The exciting news?

A new SEO Meme on Megite

Honestly for the last few days I have been thinking how useless Techmeme is for my reading. I have only passing interest in 2000 stories about CES when they only partially affect my income (niche ideas).
My solution was on Monday I was going to pop to Elance and find someone to create me a script to make my own niche memes, or spend some time finding an existing one. Megite seems to be the perfect answer, and I have a few ideas for other niches.

Lee also mentioned a number of SEO Google Co-Op CSE search engines that have been created based upon his opml file. I hope they update frequently and get used frequently.