You didn’t think I would leave it at just my expert perspective on the Technorati changes did you?
As with my previous post I want to make clear that it is somewhat of a dilemma writing about Technorati, as I provide some infrequent consultation to Blogcatalog in some ways one of their competitors.
However as well as providing an expert’s overview of Technorati I have always been an avid user, so this is Technorati from a purely user’s perspective.
Technorati have added a new "topics" feature to their front page and menus.
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.
In theory it is spam free but it is also elitist
Many people with lots of favorites in Technorati might have noticed that for the last month or so that Technorati were not displaying them, and thought that for some reason their account might have been banned.
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
Blogging experts and social media marketing experts frequently write about how important it is to build up a network of friends on social bookmarking sites, and even encourage careful gaming of the system by email and instant messenger.
Read more on Reciprocal Favoriting Gives Benefits & Adds Value…
Ben instigated a community writing project on productivity, and Dawud thoughtfully decided to encourage me to get involved, after also giving some great tips on how to be productive and stay focused.
Read more on Blogging Productivity & Criticizing Goals…
I have just been casually observing what has been happening with a few memes, and one of those is what is happening with Technorati Favorites.
It is one thing exchanging favorites with people, that creates some interesting OPML data that can be used for all finds of things, but it is a lot of hard work updating lists with all the people who post comments etc.
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
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.
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.
Read more on Technorati Favorites – Is This Evil, Lazy or Just Smart?…
For a long time my blogs have performed amazingly well with Google Blog Search. I always appear in the relevant results quickly, and the results I obtain have some reasonable longevity, even when I am not the original source of a story.
Read more on In Depth: Google BlogSearch | Ranking Blog Documents Patent…
