Like most people who take blogging fairly seriously, I use technorati to keep track of people linking to cybersoc.com. It's not just a matter of vanity* (remember egosurf?), it helps me stay involved in what Jarvis and others call "the conversation".
Technorati is a good tool, but there are a few improvements and new features I'd really like to see:
1. location specific blog searches - I don't just want to find blogs discussing politics generally, I might want to find one discussing politics in my ward of my small city
2. a recommendation engine that tells me something like "blogs like this linked to blogs that linked to you" at a glance
3. some sort of graphical representation of where my blog sits within the blogosphere as a whole, based on links, as well as for certain key words
4. the ability to see how my blog has gained or lost ranking over periods of time
5. the ability to see - and I think this is the real killer feature - what similarities there are (content, tags, time posted, sites linked to from post, etc) between my most linked to (and least linked to) posts
6. improvements to link weighting - When I link to a blog from a post, I'm saying "look at this piece of content over here". I link because it helps me make my point. When I add a link to the right or left nav of my site, it's a much more permanent link than one just dropped into a post. It's like me saying "look at this site, it's good" in a way that's much more like an endorsement of that site and it's content as being ALWAYS of high quality or interest. The latter of these should be, I think, weighted more highly than a link from an individual post.
7. explain somewhere, anywhere, why the link count used in the ranking of a blog never seems to match the one below, where users can toggle between link freshness and authority (in my case it's 665 links vs 785 - a vast gulf)
8. how about creating something that completely replaces trackback and can be embedded into a blog's template, a sort of in blog list of the most recent technorati results for that post, to help drive traffic through to the bits of conversation happening elsewhere (this may alerady be possible using other blogging platforms?)
Get those 8 bits into technorati and you've got a far more interesting and useful service for bloggers.
* Ok, it is *sometimes* about vanity - like when I point out that cybersoc.com has just entered the technorati top 10,000 (9937 to be exact).
bookmark this post: del.icio.us l Digg l Furl l ma.gnolia l Newsvine l reddit l Yahoo MyWeb l Track with co.mments
One thing I've also noticed with Technorati is that it doesn't combine my Typepad blog address and my dotcom blog address results. I guess that would be asking a bit too much... But because of that I've never been able to make any sense of Technorti ranking for my blog.
As for egosurfing. I don' bother. What I do instead is subscribe to the Technorati RSS feed of my urls and keywords. That way linkers come to me, in my newsreader, rather than me going to find them.
Posted by: Graham | 31 August 2006 at 04:30 PM
I do the same Graham - my new inbound links come to me via RSS. I've also started using co.mments a few weeks ago, on your suggestion, and have never looked back. Great tip! ;-)
Posted by: RobinH | 31 August 2006 at 05:02 PM
I think it would interesting if they allowed folks to view the list of top blogs beyond the top 100. They have the data - let us see if all the way to 1,000 or 10,000 even. It would also be interesting to see how many links are required to get to certain thresholds. It's not cool to admit it, but every blogger looks at their on rank now and then. So make it better.
Good Post.
Posted by: Todd Zeigler | 31 August 2006 at 05:41 PM