#18 Exploring the depths of the blogsphere with Technorati

You’ve been blogging for about 6 weeks now, exploring the blogs of the other participants and perhaps outside the Ferguson community. And as the blogs seems endless, perhaps you have wondered, just how big is the blogsphere? Is there an end? According to Technorati, the leading authority and search tool for blogs, 1.4 blogs are created every second, and they are currently tracking over 70 million blogs!

These numbers are truly astounding, but you have already seem for yourselves just how easy blogging can be. Many industries are taking advantage of the publishing tools to communicate their messages and ideas, including libraries!

So how do you get your blog listed as part of the blogosphere and tag your posts with keywords to make them more findable through a Technorati search? Since you are using Blogger, the most popular blogging too, changes are your blog is already being captured by Technorati. But you want more? To have your blog listed on Technorati and take advantage of the watchlist and other features, you will need to claim you blog yourself. As for tagging posts with Technorati tags, piece of cake! All you need to do is add a little bit of HTML code to the bottom of your post (see my example below) and Technorati will pick up these tags when it spiders (or web crawls) your site.

There are a lot of new features that have been added to Technorati this past summer, including new ways to search for blogs. You can search for keywords in blog posts, search for entire blog posts that have been tagged with a certain keyword, or search for blogs that have been registered and tagged as whole blogs about a certain subject (like photography or libraries).

Discovery Resources:
Technorati Tour – videocast of new features & new look
Technorati Discover & Popular features

Discovery Exercises:

1. Take a look at Technorati and try doing a keyword search for “Learning 2.0” in Blog posts, in tags and in the Blog Directory. Are the results different?
2. Explore popular blog, searches and tags. Is anything interesting or surprising in your results?
3. Create a blog post about your discoveries on this site.
   
   OPTIONAL: If you’re up for a challenge, learn how to tag your posts by with Technorati tags so they can join tag searches. Create a post about something. It can be anything you want and add the HTML code to the bottom to tag it as “fergusonlibrary”. You may also want to consider claiming your blog and creating a watchlist.NOTE: When adding HTML code, you’ll want to make sure you’re in Blogger’s Edit HTML window.

There’s a lot to explore.

Technorati: newcanaanlibrary