Thing 14 Technorati

Technorati. Who's saying what. Right now.

On Technorati's press kit page, under the window, it states:

On the World Live Web, bloggers frequently link to and comment on other blogs,
creating the type of immediate connection one would have in a conversation.
Technorati tracks these links, and thus the relative relevance of blogs, photos,
videos etc. We rapidly index tens of thousands of updates every hour, and so we
monitor these live communities and the conversations they foster.

I couldn't get the explanatory video to play, which is just as well because I find most of them pretty tiring. Apparently, the search tool is where most people start, by finding blogs, pictures, video or music relating to their query.

I did a search on "aegean archaeology" and 100 people had blogged something with those words in it this week. I think that's pretty cool.

I didn't find the rest of the feautures as user-friendly as the page suggests. For instance, I didn't see anywhere to take advantage of the ostensible new and improved "sorting options - including sorting by language, authority, and freshness" where can you do this? Do you have to be signed in?

I just searched for my own blog by name, and it came up! Whoa nelly, that's kind of creepy, but comforting, too.

While I was particularly impressed with this statement:

Second, we've worked hard to make serendipitous discovery of interesting stuff
easier and more intuitive. Our new “Discover” section, drawing on a
commonly understood newspaper metaphor, organizes the blogosphere into easily
recognized categories, within which some of the most interesting recent posts
are highlighted.

I didn't serendipitously find anything new and interesting on the page, which actually just links to the page. I don't see anywhere that organizes said entries into categories. I like that they're trying to foster this experience, this "serendipitous discovery". I think this exact experience is the closest anyone of our generation will ever come to actually practicing cartomancy, but I thought they were describing something else. What is the real difference between the and the ? How do they determine the Top 100 non-favorited blogs? Internet traffic? Links to that page? I'm confused.

I'd like to play around with this further on my own time in the future. What a great service.