Category Archives: Blogging

How to be Found by Technorati

1 Reply

Several people have been asking me why their blog posts are not appearing in Technorati search results, even after they use the Technorati Tag bookmarklet I wrote about earlier this week. (Clarification: I didn’t create it, I found it on an old web site that has since gone offline, but I had it archived in Furl.net.) Here’s what’s going on….

When you write a blog post, it has to be indexed by search engines in order for it to show up in the search engine’s results. Google goes nuts and crawls all over the web indexing like crazy – but that doesn’t mean that Google or anybody else is guaranteed to find what you’ve written. Even if you link to someone’s page, that doesn’t mean they’ll discover that until someone travels that connection – be it an indexing robot or a visitor who leaves tracks through your traffic monitoring program. (Technorati tags are really just a particular way to link to Technorati, but they still have to index the link.)

The way to get indexed quickly is to do something called pinging. You can set up (or I can set up for you) your blog to automatically tell the blog search engines (like Technorati) “Hey, look over here, I have new content for you to index!” Pinging is big business but it doesn’t have to be complicated for bloggers.

The best solution right now: use Feedburner.com for your RSS feed (a great idea for many reasons) and use their Pingshot service to automatically ping the top blog search engines. This will include Technorati and shebang – you’re Technorati Tagged posts should show up very soon after you post them in Technorati Tag Searches. Update: This post is appearing in Technorati 10 minutes after first posted.

There are alternatives, like Pingoat, but now that Feedburner offers this service it’s a not an issue. Depending on how quickly you find this post, Technorati may not have indexed it yet. But I wrote the previous one just this morning and if you click on its tags you’ll see that Technorati found it within 2 hours.

Let me know if I can help you with this or if it’s still confusing. Also, let me know if you would like to hire me to get your blog all souped up for maximum traction with all these new tools. There are many things that can be set up once and that you’ll be able to enjoy the fruits of without thinking about it in the future. My blog optimization rates are reasonable and you’ll be very glad we did it.

For now, I’m going to go back and link to this article from the original post about the bookmarklet. I should have told readers, “don’t forget to ping!” Once all your ducks are in a row you’ll see that this stuff is easy and powerful to use.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Blog Alerts: Bloggers in Trouble

2 Replies

This morning I added another section to the sidebar here, called Blog Alerts, from The Committee to Protect Bloggers. The CPB is a group that raises awareness about bloggers around the world facing state or other repression because of what they’ve written on thier blogs. You should really check them out. This BlogAlert system is something I set up for them and had on my old site. It’s a system by which the director of the CPB can write a post and put it in his category “Blog Alerts” and will thus appear automatically in the BlogAlert sections of any supporters’ web sites who have resyndicated the RSS feed for that category. You can grab the code snippet via the link at Add BlogAlerts to Your Site. This is an easy way to help spread the word quickly about bloggers in trouble. (I used Feed Digest to turn the RSS into javascript-to-HTML, very easy to do.)

Technorati Tags: , , , ,

Tagging Bookmarklet and How-To Screencast

4 Replies

Update: Just talked to a Windows person who says that the new Explorer 7 blocks some javascript bookmarklets. Going into Preferences/Security and enabling javascript will save soom bookmarklets, but not neccesarily this one. I’m going to have to get to the bottom of this for many different reasons, but it looks like this is the worst of Microsoft’s new security philosophy: block users from changing almost anything, so they don’t leave anything open to hostile intrusion. But the toolbar? I’ll figure out something asap, but I’m on a Mac so we’ll see. But I want to enable lots of Windows users to use tools like this, so I’ll see what I can figure out. In the meantime, check out the awesome screencast Beth made.

See also this post about pinging to make sure your tagged blog posts will show up in Technorati.

Drumroll please…

BlogTags

Ok, that link right there should work for people using Macs and PCs (thanks to my brother Tom the PC user!). Beth Kanter created a terrific little screencast about how to use it! Here’s the screencast itself and here’s the write up on the bookmarklet. What a neat example of collaboration, huh? Beth’s work is really cool, she’s got a great blog to check out too.

Well, thanks for the patience everybody. Hopefully this will all work now for everyone.

Technorati Tags: , , , , ,

Bookmarklet: Technorati Tags in a Second

1 Reply

Ok, so everybody loves bookmarklets – those little links you drag onto your favorites toolbar and click for instant results. There are lots of great ones out there, and I will write someday about my favorites, but I don’t want to get distracted. I want to post what I think is one of the single greatest bookmarklets out there right now – and one of the hardest to get. I don’t know why the original author of this bookmarklet took their entire website offline and used a robots.txt file to stop its contents from being saved almost anywhere, but here is…

The Technorati Tag Bookmarklet: BlogTags

Update: There has been some real confusion about how to use this bookmarklet. I’m sorry it wasn’t more clear. I’ve called it BlogTags, but you can call it what ever you want. Just hover your mouse over the words BlogTags in the previous sentence, press the mouse button and hold it down, then drag the link up to your toolbar. That’s the part of your browser just below the web adress of this page. If you can’t see a toolbar, go to View menu and select toolbar or favorites toolbar.

I love it. Drag that puppy up to your favorites toolbar and give it a click (or click on it here just to see what it does.) That code it spits out can by copied and pasted into the end of each blog post you write. I get people visiting my site through Technorati tag searches every day. You can put in the links to tag your blog posts manually, but this bookmarklet is a real time saver. I don’t know why Technorati doesn’t offer a bookmarklet like this themselves.

If you are unfamiliar with the space where the blogosphere and the tagosphere intersect, try clicking on some of the Technorati Tags at the ends of my posts here. You’ll find a whole world of other bloggers writing on the same subject.

See also: following up on the bookmarklet, my next post.

P.S. Curious how I was able to get this if the web site it came from is offline? The moment I first found it, I saved it in my Furl.net archive, which includes a cached copy automatically.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,

Web 2.0 Poetry

2 Replies

Have been getting several visitors and links therefrom over the last few hours who have very interesting things to say themselves. Longer writings, pretty involved and conceptual, and quite well written.

Check out:

Some cool discussion. If you’re getting stressed out about it, I’ll go back to writing about less conceptual stuff soon.

Technorati Tags: ,

Web 2.0 Way Ambiguous

3 Replies

This is funny. If anybody else reading here feels frustrated about the presumtion that everybody “knows” what’s being talked about with the phrase Web2.0 Here’s a few bits of info:

The Wikipedia definition is a good one:

“Web 2.0 refers to a perceived transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users. The proponents of this thinking expect that ultimately Web 2.0 services will replace desktop computing applications for many purposes.”

That’s a good wiki article that can be accessed via http://wikiwax.com search “web” and check out the other results.

If interested, I did post about some common traits of applications referred to as web2.0 oriented titled “Web 2.0 is Exploding.”

OK, most hilarious link about this issue that I’ve found so far is “How 2.0 Is…”

Technorati Tags: , , ,

MSN Search Beats Google on Inbound Link Search, Destroys “Blog Search” Engines

Leave a reply

The director of The Committee to Protect Bloggers (for whom I am a technical consultant) sent me an email tonight asking what the best way to find inbound links to their blog was. The results of my investigation were so interesting to me that I thought I’d post the email I sent in response.

How many inbound links total, like to tell people “we’re linked to by this many sites”? I am thrilled to say that the best way to find out is NOT to search in Google for link:http://committeetoprotectbloggers.civiblog.org (455 results). Strange as this might seem, I am happy to report that Microsoft’s search (MSN Search, http://search.msn.com) comes back with 15,525 results. And they look pretty damned valid. Update: As of the middle of the night MSN search is now up to 17,500+ results for this search.) Now I am certainly no fan of Microsoft, but it is a happy day for me when I can say that the best search engine for your particular need is NOT Google. Unfortunately, the “blog search” engines all suck…some so bad that I emailed them asking what’s up.

So if I’m understanding your question right, I’d say in this case to use MSN Search and tell people that the NEW CPB site has been linked to 15,525 times as of this most recent search.

If you look at the MSN results you’ll note that a large number of them are from blogs, so why do these supposed “blog search” engines not find these links? Is this related to the fact that my traffic monitor is a much better way to find who’s linking to me than are Technorati, PubSub and Feedster combined?

You know what the coolest thing is? There’s an RSS feed available for MSN Search results for web search. Who else offers RSS feeds of their search results – not of news, or of blogs, but of the whole web. Nobody I know. You have to use 3rd party, subscription based GoogleAlerts.com to get an RSS feed of Google web search results. If I can get this from MSN search, do I need Technorati?

I swear I really am cheering for Web 2.0, but I’ve been super frustrated with some performance issues lately. Just to balance out the complaining, I’ll tell you I’ve been having great experiences with Newsgator (for RSS reading), Blinkx.com (for podcast search) and Del.icio.us for rebound lovin’ post breakup with Furl.net, who hasn’t returned my email or blog post – despite some one from parent company LookSmart having a Firefox tab open on this article (Furl, I Can’t Take it Anymore!) for 5 hours today. But I’m not all about complaints!

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , ,