I claimed my blog at Technorati then I had a look around to see what the heck it really is. Spiders! Everywhere! It’s an index of blogs that get crawled by spiders for content, and makes that content findable through searches. I can immediately see why this is important. While I don’t really care about most of the CRAP people blog about, what if I wanted to know what people thought about a particular product before I buy? I can’t trust the seller, so I turn to other buyers opinions. The average Joe’s blog can be lost in the big sea of Google and Yahoo, but Technorati makes it findable. It has the pulse of American (worldly?) culture right now, and is an indication of what general, public opinion is today. It’s easy to use and even has a cute sidekick, the mini. It’s a window that stays open on the desktop with a refresh every 60 seconds for up-to-the-minute hot topics. When the blogging society starts using Microformats, I’ll be able to zero in on product & movie reviews. No more listening to the paid TV critics, whom I often suspect are endorsed by the parent companies of the movie makers. I will trust the OVERALL thoughts and blogs of the every-day average Joes collectively, before I trust a seller.
Technorati and Microformats
[…] So, Sandy has THREE posts on microformats! The first one is called Technorati and Microformats and I learned a bunch there. We discussed Technorati in class and I’ve read a bit about it, but there’s something about reading a classmate’s description of it that gives it a fresh perspective and makes it more understandable. Maybe it’s the peer quality; makes it less intimidating and therefore easier to digest. So what I got is that Technorati is essentially a search engine for blogs. You can claim your blog there so others can find you more easily and you can also use it, as Sandy pointed out, for seeing what other people are saying about topics that interest you. The neat thing about it is that it pretty much operates in live time. You can get updates on new posts every 60 seconds. Cool! […]
Any web page can use Microformats to markup reviews, not just blogs. Technorati, however, just tracks blog content.