Thing #11: Technorati

So thing #11 is the blog directory Technorati. I started look at this some weeks ago but it took a while to go through their setting up process and so I've only now had a chance to write up my experience with it.

Technorati is another tool that was new to me through the 23 Things programme. It's a directory and search engine for blogs. I wouldn't have known what it was just from looking at the site - there seemed to be very little 'who are we and what do we do' content and rather a lot of advertisements.

First: browsing. Technorati has categories that you can browse through to find relevant blogs but most of these weren't useful to me from a professional perspective. Instead I did a search across blog descriptions for 'archives' and 'archivist'. It brought up a few I was unaware of [such as Alone In The Archives], a few I knew, and a few that sounded like they might have been interesting but no longer existed. Such is the internet.

Interestingly, unless I just couldn't find it, there didn't seem to be a way to 'favourite' or 'like' a blog within Technorati which surprised me as I'm so used to this functionality now in other Web 2.0 applications. It would have been useful to see what blogs had been liked by other bloggers who were interested in the same areas as me (i.e. archives). It also meant there's not a great deal of need to get back to Technorati regularly as once you've found the blogs that interest you, you need to save them to your own internet books/favourites anyway.

Secondly: adding myself to technorati. This proved to be a rather labyrinthine procedure involving posting a code and then having the code verified and so on and so forth. After about a week I got my confirmation though and this blog is now included.

Technorati rates blogs with an authority score from 1-1000. It rated mine as 68 which was the second highest in a search for 'archivist'. The Rating is derived from 'linking behaviour' so presumably because I put a lot of links in my pists usually, I get a high rating. For comparison, Archives Next which I would say is pretty much the centre of the archives world online, certainly for web 2.0, gets 74. That's not to say that I'm great, that's just to say their authority scoring leaves a little something to be desired.

So ultimately: an interesting way to find new blogs but not a tool you'd need to look at very often. But obviously if you came here via Technorati do say hi so I know if it's working [cue deafening silence, no doubt!].