Blog Tracking and Tags
Technorati and Blogpulse are probably the two more prominent services that track blog posts and acitivity, and they both operate just differently enough that I use them both.
The thing is, I really dont’ understand how either of them work. For example, I started this blog three days ago, but if you search for “jason-preston.com” on Technorati, every single one of my posts show up. On Blogpulse, it goes “eh? nope. nothing here, sorry.” So I know at least that they have different methods of finding and indexing blogs—but I don’t know how to take advantage of either system.
Technorati I think is largely based on Tags, a phenominon that’s not entirely new, but definitely newly reinvigorated. The concept, I think, is that any page, post, or item (in this case blog posts) online can be “tagged” with certain keywords, rather like filing them into folders with certain labels. This enables people to browse these posts or pages by subject or “tag” rather than actually searching for a certain phrase. In theory, this helps when you want to see information about a certain subject, but don’t really know how to phrase a particular query. The flip-side of course is that anyone can tag anything with whatever they like, so there’s no guarantee that everything will be properly related.
What I don’t understand is how the tagging process works. I’m going to try ganking some code from Technorati to put a “technorati tag” in this post, but beyond that and del.icio.us, I don’t really know how it works.