The “tagged web” and Using Technorati

mrbrown’s blog has this post about Shel Israel mentioning Singapore blogs. Shel mentions that he was looking for Singapore related topics on Technorati. Technorati is a tracking engine for the blogsphere. It lets you looks for trends, patterns and entries by different people on similar topics or issues. It does this by encouraging people to “tag” their entries. Tags are words or phrases that describe your individual posts (something like the categories on blogs but more focussed and narrow). I think it is a good idea to participate in builiding a “tagged” web for Singapore or wherever you are.

I was talking about social software like meetup.com, friendster, bloglines ect. last week at the campus and we covered some features of technorati.com too - subscribing, adding tags and using watchlists to track what people are saying about some issue. Here is a short tutorial you may find useful if you plan to use Technorati.

In an earlier story on my blog, I mentioned “tag activism”. Students in China, upset over authorities restricting public access to their campus BBS services, asked their friends and supporters to blog about this issue. To make it easier for others to find these protest blog posts, the bloggers added a tag to their post. The tag they were using was “smth”. (smth is the name of one of the BBS that was affected.)

If you go to Technorati.com and in the search box enter the words - tag: smth, you will see a list of blog postings and flickr pictures related to the protest.

Earlier this month, Singapore Bloggers were writing about Straits Time’s(the local daily here in Singapore) decision to charge people for the online edition. Some bloggers were trying to collate links to such entries on their own blogs. Tagging can optimise this process. If we had all added a tag - say something like “STonline” to our posts, we could have then monitored all the posts by just going to Technorati and searching for this tag. Welcome to social blogging.

Consider another situation. We have some student groups who are going this summer to other parts of Asia for their service learning projects. We want them to blog about their experiences. So we are asking them to create accounts at blogger.com and flickr. Now some of these guys already have a blog and they might end up writing about their experiences on their own blog. We don’t want these guys to maintain another blog just for this project. Instead, we will ask them to continue writing on their existing blogs and just tag that particular post with a “volunteeringphilippines2005″ or “volunteeringsabah2005″ tag. We can can then monitor all their posts from Technorati.

Signing up on Technorati

To explore the “tagged web” further lets sign up on Technorati.

This is the main page of Technorati.com, This is where you sign up. Check out the “Become a Member” section.

On the next page, we enter our information. You only need to enter username, password and email address.

Technorati informs you that your sign up is complete.

Now you can click on “Claim your blog”. This process lets technorati know that you actually own the blog that you are entering here.

Enter the URL of your blog here.

There are three ways in which you can “claim your blog”

1) If your blog is hosted on Blogger.com or Typepad, then the claiming process is very easy. Technorati can automatically connect to your account and verify that the blog address you entered really belongs to you. Just type in your blog username and password and click on the “Quick claim this weblog” button.

2) For blogs hosted on other platforms (Wordpress, Typepad etc.), Technorati can’t do this automatic ownership check. So Technorati is asking you a question here. Can you edit your blog template? If you have added a Tagboard or a Chatbox to you page before, you already know about “editing your blog template”. Copy the code from the box on the bottom left and paste it on to your blog’s template.
Note that you can use this method for your blogger.com or typepad.com blogs instead of the automatic detection mentioned in step 1. If you use this method, you will get a technorati link on your Blog.

Your users can click on this link to see how many people are linking to you.
After you have added the code to you blog template and saved it, click on the “Yes, Proceed” button at the bottom.

3) If you don’t have much experience editing your blog template, you can copy and paste the code from the bottom right box as a separate item in your blogroll or blog links.

Your sign up and “claiming of blog” is complete. You can login on Technorati any other time and claim more blogs.

Getting your Blog software to ping to Technorati
You can setup your blog to “ping” Technorati when you hit the submit or publish button on your blogging tool. This “pinging” informs Technorati to index the tags on your post. You can setup your blogging tool to ping to Technorati by using the instructions on this page. They provide instructions for common blogging tools.
Technorati: Ping Configurations

Adding tags to your blog entry.

Let’s say I have finished typing in my entery about how angry I am with ST for wanting me to pay for online archives.
Before I click that “Post” button, I will go to Technorati.com and run a search with this text
tag: STonline

Technorati gives me the text that I can copy and paste on my post. Paste it after the last line of your entry.

This is how the text looks like.
<a href="http://technorati.com/tag/STonline" rel=”tag”>STonline</a>

An example here, I am pasting some tags here on one of my entries about a newspaper in India that encourages its readers to blog. This is how the last few lines of my post looks like.

This is how my posted entry looks like

The visitors coming to my site can click on the tags to explore similar entries from other people.

What else can I use Technorati for? Try the Watchlist feature.

Technorati can also be used to create a “Watchlist”. Think of Watchlists as some item you want to continuously track. For example, I am interested in what people are talking about Ngee Ann Polytechnic (the institution I work with) on their blogs.

I logged on to Technorati. I selected “member tools” from the main tab on top.

Here we are adding the item I wanted Technorati to track.

In this example I am typing in the text. But my watchlist can be a tag too. I can type in - tag: STonline in the Watchlist box here.

The item appears on my Watchlist.

I can click on that “balloon” to see the blog entries about Ngee Ann Poly.

Note that Technorati is able to track pages even if these guys are not subscribed to Technorati. Also a lot of these people have not tagged their pages with the text “Ngee Ann Poly”. Technorati works like a regular search engine too.

technorati tutorial
social blogging

Anything I missed out, please leave a comment. I will keep updating this post.