What is Technorati?

I have been meaning to sign up for Technorati for a long time. I finally got around to it about a week ago and thought it would be a great topic for a Tipsy Tuesday post!

Technorati is a directory / search engine that indexes just blogs. In 2008, that was over 100 million blogs & I couldn’t find the number for what it is right now. Crazy right?!

Whether you’re a blogger or not, it’s good for several things:

1. Get your blog listed. It’s not hard but it is a bit time consuming. If you’re serious about blogging it certainly can’t hurt! Here’s the general steps:

• Visit http://www.technorati.com and sign up for free.
• Fill out your profile & then click “Claim Your Blog.”
• Add your URL in and wait for the email to come through to verify ownership.
• You’ll then have to head over to your blog and publish the claim token they’ve provided you in the email in a new blog post.
• Then head back to your profile and “Verify the Claim.”
• Now we wait.  Once accepted, it will take awhile for your blog to get listed and start updating through Technorati, but it’s worth the wait!

2. Resources for bloggers.  There is a channel of Technorati all about blogging which is a great place to get ideas and support.

3. If you’re a WordPress user, you’ll want to install the WP Tags to Technorati plugin so that the tags you use in WordPress will translate well to the Technorati system when people are searching for topics.

4. If you’re not a blogger but you are a blog reader, it’s great to find new blogs that are of interest to you – you can search by category and see the most popular, etc.

So, do you have a blog?  Do you just like reading blogs?  Personally I love blogging.  Some people blog with the hope of a revenue stream, some do it like a “dear diary,” and then there’s those of us in the middle.  I just think it’s a fun challenge to find something to say everyday and to make new friends all the time all over the world!