Why me? I’ve been good (mostly). And yet Technorati doesn’t like me and has been mocking (driven me crazy) all weekend! Friends are meant to play nicely aren’t they?

Admittedly people might question why care if Technorati likes you. To be honest, I don’t, except:

• There are bloggers who prefer to read posts by subscribing to technorati tags than to subscribing to individual blogs.
• People use blog search engines to locate blogs worth reading.
• RSS feed from a technorati tag can be used to collect posts when a group uses a common tag

Using RSS from a technorati tag to bring posts by groups is a powerful feature which can be used to bring all posts written by the group to one location to be easily located and read. e.g. Comment Challenge participants are tagging their posts comment08 and latest posts written by participants are automatically added to one central location on the wiki plus they can add the RSS feed from the tag to their feed reader e.g. Google Reader, Bloglines, NetVibes.

As a blogger it’s important to optimise your blog visibility so your posts are easily found on Technorati.

About Technorati

Technorati and Google Blog Search are both search engines used for searching keyword (i.e. tag) or category used to describe the subject matter or topic of a blog post. Technorati is generally better at locating posts than Google Blog Search.

If you want your blog to appear in technorati blog search directory and your posts to be found in their searches you need to join Technorati and then claim your blog.

Below is an example of how your blog will look to others once you have claimed your blog.

Authority is the number of blogs linking to your website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority your blog has. Technorait measures the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority.

The blog with the highest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. Your Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top ranking blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.

Searching Technorati

You can do a basic search or an advanced search on Technorati. As most people use basic search and since technorati’s basic search searches for the keywords within posts it’s a good idea to include keywords, and variations of keywords, when writing your post (provided it doesn’t detract from readability).

For example if I wrote a post about mlearning I may include words like mobile learning, m-learning and mobile technologies within the text of my post. Unfortunately Technorati doesn’t recognise words like m-learning as a search term and this needs to be written as mlearning.

You can subscribe to the RSS feed from technorati searches using your feed reader or add the RSS feed to another site e.g. like we have done with the Comment Challenge wiki. We’ve needed to refine our searches to capture more posts.

This refined search was used for adding the RSS feed from the comment08 tag to our wiki so participants can check latest posts.

The better option for a group to receive latest posts is to subscribe to the RSS feed from technorati using their feed reader.

What We Need You To Do For The Comment Challenge

Encouraging the community aspect is an important part of the Comment Challenge. We need for all posts from the Challenge to be included in the RSS feed from Technorati so participants can easily find each other and interact. With over 100 adult participants and 8 student groups (over 200 students) technorati is the most efficient method of bringing together all posts.

For all adult participants we need you to:

1. If you are recording your reflections on a blog — Join and claim your blog at Technorati
2. If you have a blog already claimed on technorati — can you please log into Technorati and ping your blog (some of your blogs haven’t accessed posts from your blog for 90 days which means we won’t see any of the posts you are writing).
3. Tag all posts written for the Challenge using comment08 – refer to instructions on the challenge wiki.
4. Add the RSS feed from the technorati comment08 tag to your Feed Reader (preferably Google Reader so that you can do a search of this RSS feed using Google Reader to make sure your posts are included).
5. If you aren’t blogging your learning journey but are recording them using another online tool please add it’s location to your participants details. If you want to set up your own blog go here to create your blog for free! (here’s our Getting Started with Edublogs page with lots of “How to” manuals and videos to get you going).
6. Refer to this information for how to tag comments you write during this Challenge.

This is how you tag your posts if you use Edublogs.

For student participants please:

1. Don’t use comment08 tag with your student — instead use the tag studentcomment08
2. Liaise with the other teachers in the challenge to coordinate your activities.

FINAL THOUGHTS

If you’re wondering why technorati drove me crazy this weekend — it has taken me considerable time to realise all the different reasons why all posts weren’t being found. Hopefully this information helps you understand how to use technorati better.

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