Just Ask Barry- What is Technorati?

As part of my Just Ask Barry articles-

“I've heard a lot about Technorati, but - what does it do, why should we use it, and then HOW do we use it?” Sharon Simms.

What is Technorati?

Technorati is a search engine that indexes blogs. When you post an article to ActiveRain (or most blogs in general) the system sends out a message to various blog directories and search engines. This message is called a ‘ping’.

When Technorati receives a ping, it sends an automated search spider to take a look at the recent article you just wrote. It looks for incoming and outgoing links, takes down basic information from the blog (name, location, etc), and then returns the information to the Technorati database.

This information is cross-referenced along with information from almost 60 million other blogs. As authors and readers submit more articles and information, Technorati allows users to search the data and find popular blogs on a specific topic.

How do I use Technorati?

First, visit Technorati.com and create a user account. It is completely free and entirely worthwhile.

There are three basic things you can do with Technorati from a basic user perspective.
(the following three links take you directly to Technorati’s tutorial area)

SEARCH for the blogs you're looking for

DISCOVER new blogs, videos, and breaking stories

ORGANIZE the blogs and topics you care about most

Promoting a blog-

Once you have an active membership, you can long into Technorati and claim a blog (declaring that you are the author of a specific blog). You can do this by going into you account page and clicking on the Claim another blog now link. Technorati will provide you with a cut and paste code that you insert into an ActiveRain article which confirms to Technorati you are the author of that blog.

Once you have claimed your blog in the directory, you can add a basic description about it so that viewers know a little more about it. In the future you can add buttons to you posts members can add your blog to their ‘favorites’ list, which assists Technorati in tracking what blogs are being read and relevant to a topic. 

In addition, Technorati uses a tag system like ActiveRain, so that users can find specific posts within the 60 million other blogs. For instance, two weeks ago we used the tag BBS06 to highlight posts covering the Blog Business Summit 2006.

In summary, Technorati is highly valuable to most ActiveRain users for locating current information. You can pretty much type in any topic within the Technorati search engine and find someone who has been blogging about it within the past week (sometimes within the last five minutes). 

Hopefully that gives you some explanation as to what Technorati can do for you!