Thing 11: Technorati

I am quite glad this Thing came along now, firstly because it follows on from my previous posts about raising the blogs' visibility and secondly because it findly reminds me to add this code into a post: Q3NVXVBSKQMT

I registered all my blogs on Technorati a while ago and I managed to stick the codes surreptitiously (hah!) into the bottom of some posts on my other blogs but kept forgetting on this blog.  Adding this code will mean that Technorati will now believe me when I told them I am the author of this blog.  I mentioned Technorati when I was talking at our team day about raising the blogs' visibilty externally; Technorati indexes blogs and ranks them according to their authority (based on how much the blog is referenced by other sites and in-bound links), you can then display your ranking (if it's something to be proud of) on your blog.  So now all my blogs are indexed by Technorati and thus exposed in the wider blogosphere that little bit more.  Actually, having just logged in, I realised that my fashion business blog still hasn't been registered so I will get onto that.....

Another site which offers a very similar service is Wikio.  Wikio's emphasis is more on news stories, calling itself a news search engine, but it also does feature a blog ranking section.  There are some differences in the way Technorati and Wikio rank blogs but as I am not likely to get very high in the rankings I'm not too worried about the differences.  What I did notice though was that on Wikio it was a lot easier for me to register my blogs.  You can do it here.  You don't have to register for an account and there was none of this having to fit a claim code in your posts.  Having said that, thinking it about it again, I have no idea what happened after I registered my Wikio blogs and I can't find them so again more investigation is needed.......

From the other perspective I honestly don't think I would ever use sites like these to find blogs of interest; I would take recommendations from friends/colleagues, blogs I read or just by doing a general search.  But in the name of 23 things I tried a search. I searched for fashion management/fashion business/retail blogs to add to my fashion blog "blog-roll".  Initially the search wasn't much good- a lot of vaguely related blogs of little authority, however I managed to find the "refine" button, which was actually very useful as it allowed me to see only high authority blogs and choose a particular category.  This narrowed the search well down and I found a few good blogs but wasn't hugely successful.  I then tried a browse to find the highest ranked music blogs, nothing particularly inspiring.  Searched for posts on "David Ford" and found nothing.  Started to want to give up.  Then I did a search for Classics and came across the brilliant Mary Beard's Times Online blog.  I found out from this that she taught Latin as part of Jamie Oliver's Dream School (though has featured very little so far). It's great that Latin was included as part of this Dream School- it could do with a bit of a boost, and I hope she features more later in the series.  

Summary of thing 11: A good way to easily raise the visibility of your blog and direct a wider audience towards you.  For finding blogs I didn't find it that useful so will look forward to read other 23 thing-ers posts to see if I've missed something.  I have come across Mary Beard's blog in the past so I can't claim Technorati did a lot here but in this instance I suppose it did get me to the blog and has reminded me to add it to my RSS feed.  So a small amount of success.....

Photo: Fish at London Zoo taken by Ellie