Technorati Does Tags

Ian@FalsePositives.com writes "Technorati (a search engine for blogs) has a new 'tag' service. If your blog tool of choice uses Categories, has a RSS/Atom feed, and pings technorati, then you're done. If not, you can add tags via a new tag markup. The twist is that Technorati is working with Del.icio.us (a social/sharing bookmark manager website) and Flickr (a social/sharing photo web site) to read their tagged content! So Flickr pictures, Del.Ico.us bookmarks, and blog posts all on one page! Here's an example result for the tag Toronto. There is some documentation as well. One current limitation is that there is no way to do tag intersection as with del.icio.us (i.e. http://del.icio.us/tag/toronto+food ) like http://www.technorati.com/tag/toronto+Food. Tagging (also know as Folksonomies) was the topic recently on Slashdot: Folksonomies In Del.icio.us and Flickr."

Comments

Technorati is News for Nerds

[philovivero]

Technorati is one of the coolest companies in the valley (and they're in the city!) I actually interviewed with them for a database position. They have a truly gigantic database server cluster (well, okay, not if you compare to Google, but everyone's small compared to Google) and a very interesting data mining problem.

Right now their search engine is a little rusty, but it won't take much for them to tune this into something very cool.

The first question that I asked them when interviewing was: "Why you instead of Google." Their answer was intriguing.

They are interested in what people are talking about on the internet right now. One thing they noted: Google actually dings you on pagerank if people are linking to you currently. On Technorati's engine, you get extra bonus points if people are linking to you right now.

Also, whereas Google crawls the web every couple of weeks, Technorati crawls the whole blogosphere almost real-time. How they do that is a trick I would probably get sued to tell you, so figure it out yourself. :)

Re:Technorati is News for Nerds

[RidiculousPie]

Google actually dings you on pagerank if people are linking to you currently.

Isn't this because the distortion of pagerank that dense crosslinking of blogs was creating and thus making it harder to find the information you were looking for?

I remember doing google searches and finding the first page to be blog results, but I haven't recently had a similar experience.

Does this make sense, or is my brain not working at half two in the morning?

Re:Technorati is News for Nerds

[tobes]

I'm suprised that Google isn't taking some of that sweet IPO cash and buying up all of these companies. I know I find more valuable information from del.icio.us than from Google, and that's simply amazing considering the size difference. I know the scope of their operations is different, but if Google's mission is "to help people find things" (not sure if it is or not), they should consider the folksonomy play.

Blog-O-Mania

[orangeguru]

Even when your blog is boring and the content just recycled stuff - at least you can pollute google and many other services. Great!

The new tools from flickr, technocrate and delicious won't help sorting out the 'better' stuff. Still blogs about young fertile women and web design/blogging receive the most 'attention', links etc. ...

This page http://technorati.com/tag/ hardly contains any relevant information at all..

No matter how many links, words and tags you track - they all won't tell you if an entry is any good, if the content is well researched and well written. Measuring quantity is not always a good way to filter out quality.

Here come the nasties?

[Peter Cooper]

Wow, it really does work. I posted something that mentioned the word Toronto, and bam, I'm at the top of a page Slashdot linked to. Yes, it appears this system is kinda open to abuse, and that's what worries me about using systems like Technorati and del.icio.us as some sort of magical community showhome. They're great as personal tools, for organizing my links or looking who's linking to my site.. but for monitoring how communities use things? I'm not so sure on that. del.icio.us is already getting spammed, and I bet Flickr will be covered with spam images on popular tags within time.

Yikes

[Lu Xun]

I know I'm becoming outdated: I only understand half the terms in that post.

It's great, but it's bad

[digitalgimpus]

Here the problems I see:

People mislabeling their posts, just for high ratings.

- Why not put your post about your anger towards your mother under "Tsunami" to get more traffic!

- Spammers?

- Multi-posts? I know myself like many don't always create 10,000 posts a day. Just no reason. If I have 1 thing to say about 10 things, I post once with multiple categories...

So that post appears in 10 places?

IMHO it's a great idea, but I think something like slashdot moderation will be needed to keep the polution to a minimum. +1 the good relevent material. -1 the bad stuff.

Amen to that.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Actually, I like my massive amounts of information, if it's well-sorted and I can read it.

But this is the first Slashdot article I've seen in about a year that I had to read twice, and I still don't understand wtf they are trying to do, the how or the why, anything.

How, exactly, does such a thing differ from Google?