Technorati (#18)

I tried a lot of different search features, searching both for blogs and for postings on a subject. Found interesting blogs on technology, gardening, science, health, politics by searching; and browsed thru the Popular Blogs, Channel and Explore features to find some more and see what the range is like. Advanced search features worked better than the general search for relevance, but there were some tech. glitches with all searching ('Technorati experiencing tech difficulties'). Good tags are clearly critical. It's interesting to see what the most popular/top blogs are, although they aren't necessarily the most interesting blogs. I don't find the Authority ratings very useful for locating good content, although clearly they would be useful for marketing and PR purposes. In a previous job, I found Technorati a useful tool (among others) for monitoring what users/subscribers were saying on the blogs about the company's online product and it's competitors. There was an interesting article in Searcher Magazine recently, concerning "The Medical Blogophere", largely from a healthcare PR perspective, which highlights the issues with compiling a list of top-ranked medical blogs to monitor (and the limits of the authority rank). They recommend using multiple blog search engines (e.g. Google Bogs, Bloglines, etc) in addition to Technorati. I used Google Blog search for comparison for a number of my searches, and found things that didn't come up in Technorati. Both had some unique items. In teaching patrons how to find blogs or search for topics in blogs, this is good to keep in mind. Technorati does have nice features, though, for seeing what is popular, etc.