What is Technorati

There is some talk among bloggers concerning Technorati.
Some say it is the greatest thing in the world for getting traffic to your blog while others say it is flawed.

I will take a few posts to examine the pros and cons of Technorati.

What is Technorati?
The folks at Technorati say that they are the leading monitor of the world of weblogs.

It is all about links. Technorati is a real-time search engine that allows you to find out what people are saying about you, your company, your products, your competitors, and, other areas of interest, on the Internet in real time .

Think of it as an Internet search engine that indexes and searches blogs. As of June 2008, Technorati indexes 112.8 million blogs and over 250 million pieces of tagged social media.

How does it work?

This is where linking becomes important. Because blogs tend to be frequently updated, articles you find on a weblog's homepage one day may not be there the next. A permalink is the permanent identifier to a specific weblog post or article. Bloggers love permalinks — they provide an easy way to capture specific references to posts or articles about which bloggers are writing.

Why is linking so important?
A link from one weblog to another helps provide context around an argument or point, and it is essentially a "vote of attention" from one blogger to another. By linking to another site or blog, the weblog author is saying, "I find what you are saying important enough to link to it." Linking also helps create the conversation of the Web, the critical mass of connected thought that is not available in static text.

Therefore, you need to be aware of your sites relevance on the Web. This can help with your authority, a term I'll explore in another post.

Technorati was founded to help bloggers to succeed by collecting, highlighting, and distributing the online global conversation. As the leading blog search engine and most comprehensive source of information on the blogosphere, they index more than 1.5 million new blog posts in real time and introduce millions of readers to blog and social media content.