Technorati Blog

Engage or Die: the Impact of Social Media on Business

Years ago, when bloggers were first earning worldwide attention and influence, Technorati was among of the first major efforts to organize the millions of blogs and related conversations into a useful directory. Over time, Technorati became the hub that connected bloggers with wider audiences and eventually advertisers.

But blogs were just one part of the social media revolution. Social networks, such as Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and the like, expanded the ability for anyone to publish, share, and discover information. Along the way, social media became a focal point for businesses, and any organization or cause really, as social media champions realized that the ability to connect directly with people could have positive and even profound effects.

And that’s where things went completely haywire almost overnight.

Read the full article here.

Fight for Your Right to Write (on Technorati)

Symbiotic, synergistic, and one hand washes the other: write for Technorati - you win, we win. The more you write, the bigger the benefits. Find your niche and sign up for a recurring feature. And don't forget to join our writers community for access to story ideas, press releases, promotional ideas, and moral support. Here's more information about becoming a writer for Technorati or Blogcritics.

Here's more about what we're looking for:

Blogging

The Blogging channel is the home of our social media coverage. We typically are looking for pieces that talk to best practices in social media strategy, news on new services and tools, measurement, audience engagement, blog reviews and trends in the blogosphere, e.g. top Twitter trends of the week.

Business

The Business channel covers a wide variety of business issues, including Advertising, Finance, Small Business and Guru (a sub-channel that is meant for those who have specific expertise in related business issues, e.g. real-estate, entrepreneurship, etc.). Like other channels, we are looking for news driven content as well as opinionated pieces that hit o n topical, controversial and trending business issues.

Entertainment

Entertainment news is the secret vice of millions and millions of Internet surfers around the globe — and you can get reach those millions via Technorati's Entertainment channel. We are seeking celebrity sleuths, gossip hounds, TV-oholics, musicphiles and gaming experts. Whether your interest is following the latest celebrity train-wreck or writing recaps of your favorite sitcom, there's a place here for your witticisms, critiques and snark.

Lifestyle

The Lifestyle channel is Technorati's catch-all section where random news has a home. However, the channel has a few sub-channels, including Green, Travel, Autos, Motorcyles and Family. We currently have dedicated writers to Green and Travel and are looking for someone to take ownership of Motocyles as well as cover Family-related issues. All items should be news driven or focus on a specific opinion on a related news item.

Politics

The Politics channel looks to cover everything that's happening in Washington, to issues bubbling at the regional and local level, as well as share hot political news from around the world. Whether the issue is global in scale or a ballot question that will impact a single state, the Political Channel will have it covered. We are looking for hard news stories, exclusives, trend features, interviews with political figures, etc. -- anything that will send waves throughout the political blogosphere.

Sports

Technorati Sports home for any and all lovers and writers of sports. We run the gamut, from mainstream sports (NHL, NBA, MLB and NFL) to the smaller niches like tennis and even marathon running. If you're looking for an opportunity to promote yourself, improve your writing, and maybe even brand your own sports niche with a feature, Technorati Sports is just right for you.

Videos

The Videos channel is home to Technorati's coverage of the web's best videos. Viral videos, sketch comedy, movie trailers, are music videos are all fair game here. Maybe you'll help launch the next viral sensation! We also welcome news and analysis relating to trends and technology in the vast world of online video.

We're Launching AdSense for Technorati and Blogcritics Writers

Technorati and Blogcritics writers: we’ve launched a new feature that allows you to profit from your success: AdSense revenue from your articles that goes directly to you!

 

(New writers can sign up here to become a Blogcritic or write for Technorati.)

 

We’re starting with a six month trial. To get started, simply update your writer profile with your AdSense account. You’ll receive a dedicated AdSense ad on each of your articles. The revenue generated from those ads goes straight to you. The more you write and promote your articles, the more you earn.

 

If you don’t have one, you’ll need to get an AdSense account. For an AdSense overview, you can take this tour. The AdSense sign-up is here. There will be a spot on your author profile page to add in your AdSense account number (see below). Then add Blogcritics and Technorati to your "Allowed Sites" list on your AdSense account.

 

If you love to write and want to expand your audience and improve your craft, Blogcritics and Technorati can offer you exposure, coaching, and community, as well as access to review material, interviews, press releases and story ideas.

We're proud to count some of the web's best amateur and professional writers among our global membership of more than 3000 writers. Whatever your interests, your writing will find a home at one (or both!) of our sites. Our active community of writers and our open comments policy provide you the opportunity to engage in dialog on a diversity of topics with readers and writers from around the globe.

We’ve Launched a New Self-Serve Advertising Portal for Bloggers and Publishers

We’ve launched a new self-serve portal for bloggers and other social media publishers. The new portal will enable us to fill even more of your ad inventory much more efficiently. If you’re already part of Technorati Media, you don’t need to do anything, you’ll be moved over. If you’re not, and you want to start monetizing your blog, you can sign up here.

Where did all my authority go?

There have been a lot of questions, discussion, and speculation about why many claimed blogs display with very low authority and without any recent posts on the new Technorati site.

As anyone who used our search functionality on the old site in the past year knows, one of the major problems Technorati has been battling is how to provide good, useful search results without them being poisoned by spam, scrapers, free article reposters, and the like. We obviously failed at cleaning the data after it got into our search set, as we had numerous spam blogs with authorities in the hundreds.

Our solution, as briefly described in our Indexing FAQ and Blog Claiming FAQ, is to work from a known clean data set. It probably won't ever be perfectly clean, but try some popular keyword searches on the new site and you'll see the tremendous improvement. Sites that we have added to the clean index are being crawled, having detailed authority calculated, display recent posts (one at the moment) on our site, and contribute to other sites authority.  We are continuously adding more and more sites to this index, and are working on ways to do so faster, but as you can imagine, the volume of sites to qualify is enormous.

Despite some of the speculation & hyperbole you may have seen, the only judgment call that can be inferred here is that, if a site is in the index (has higher authority and displays recent posts), then Technorati is pretty certain that it is a true blog (or news site -- we have those too).  If you find any sites getting that treatment that do not belong, please feel free to let us know in the Site Details page comments on Technorati.com, or over at GetSatisfaction/Technorati.  But as far as reading our minds goes, that's it.  If a site is NOT in our clean set, it doesn't mean anything other than that, today, that site is not in our index. It does not mean we have any opinion about the site and is not an assessment on the site's quality, worth, or usefulness.  It's a safe bet that we just haven't had a chance to look at it yet.

As I said, we are continuously adding new sites, and are investigating ways to speed up & optimize that process. We hope to have a way for Technorati community members to nominate or sponsor additional sites as well, but that will be further down the road.

How to Use the Media in Social Media

How should marketers use social media as a marketing vehicle? First remember the "media" in "social media". There are obviously wonderful viral and engagement opportunities in social media, but it's important to remember that there's a pure media play necessary if any type of consistent scale is to be achieved. Lee Odden interviewed Richard Jalichandra about this after a panel at SES: here's a video of the conversation.

Mainstream Media, We Can Index Your Blogs Too

We’ve heard from more than a few of you that you think Technorati only indexes "independent" bloggers. If you’re part of the mainstream media or a corporate blogger, keep reading. First, what does Technorati consider to be a blog? Here’s the Wikipedia definition. This is pretty close to what we go by. A Blog (a contraction of the term Web log) is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. That’s pretty good – but as blogging has become a mass medium, it gets harder to define. According to our most recent State of the Blogosphere, 1 in 4 bloggers have help on their blogs. And mainstream sites are incorporating quite a bit from the blogosphere: 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs. For a great example, look no further than the New York Times (link). Are they less a part of the blogosphere because of where they’re hosted? The many followers of Technorati Top 100 blogger Saul Hansell would say no. Remember, if you want Technorati to index your blog, you need to let us know you’re there. You can ping Technorati by simply entering the permalink from your post into our ping page, or by setting your blog to autoping. Or claim your blog: letting us know who you are up front puts your blog in a higher priority in the queue. Mainstream Media bloggers, we want hear from you.

Rolling out the new crawler

Over the last six months we've been working on a rewrite of our blog crawling infrastructure from the ground up. Sometimes it seems like blogs are like fingerprints, no two are alike. With a new architectural approach, we've added a lot better coverage of many new blogging conventions, better visibility and tracking of what is happening in the internals of the crawler, and how to do a better job of recognizing all the great content bloggers are discussing and linking to. The time has come to retire the original Technorati crawler. Most blogs from the larger platforms have been using the new crawler for a few months and we're now ready to convert the rest of the blogs in our index. We've been moving large portions of blogs during the past two weeks and still have a lot to go. The large scale shift has put some strain on our crawl queues and data management systems during this wave of updates. The big push has resulted in slower times to index than usual. We're working hard to keep the new posts coming in and expect the majority of the backlog to be sorted out during this next week. We appreciate your patience. I think you'll like the results when everything is converted. Keep on blogging. The Crawler Development Team.

Help Us Support the DonorsChoose.org Blogger Challenge

On October 1st, we’re teaming up to support DonorsChoose.org in their 2nd Annual Blogger Challenge DonorsChoose.org is dedicated to getting our kids the materials, resources and experiences they need to learn. They’re challenging the blogosphere to compete to see who can rally the most support for public schools. Across the blogosphere, bloggers are creating giving pages that list specific classroom requests in public schools--and then encouraging their readers to donate to those classroom requests. Technorati is sponsoring the "generosity rankings" – which also means that at the end of the challenge we’ll be broadcasting the results showing which bloggers drove the most generosity. You can see the current giving contest here. During the last DonorsChoose.org Blogger Challenge, blog readers donated $420,000 toward classroom projects benefitting 75,000 students in low-income communities. This year, the need is even more urgent: the rough road ahead for the US economy means an even rougher road for public schools. With your participation, you and your readers can help thousands of public school kids. It’s easy: HOW YOUR BLOG CAN HELP 1. Pick a few classroom requests posted on DonorsChoose.org and add them to a challenge page which takes 1-2 minutes to set up. 2. Do a post on October 1 encouraging your readers to donate to any of the classroom requests on each of your challenge page. Your readers can give as little as $5. 3. Publish a widget which pulls in the classroom requests you have selected and shouts out the readers who have donated to those requests. Simply select the category to which your blog belongs to grab the appropriate widget. If you have additional questions or need help getting started, feel free to contact DonorsChoose.org directly at bloggers@DonorsChoose.org. BACKGROUND ON THE CHARITY DonorsChoose.org grew out of a high school in the Bronx where teachers saw their students going without the materials needed to learn. Our website provides an easy way for everyday people to address this problem. Public school teachers post project requests that range from a $100 classroom library, to a $600 digital projector, to a $1,000 trip to the zoo. People like you can choose which projects to fund and then get photos and thank-you letters from the classroom. BACKGROUND ON THE 2008 DONORSCHOOSE.ORG BLOGGER CHALLENGE In October of 2007, bloggers competed to see who could rally the most support for public schools via DonorsChoose.org. Blog readers gave $420,000 to classroom projects benefitting 75,000 students in low-income communities. While A-list bloggers like Engadget and TechCrunch inspired great generosity, smaller blogs with really engaged readers generated even more! In fact, it was a personal blog from Brooklyn, TomatoNation who brought in a whopping $100,000. Thank you so much for your support.

Delays in Indexing

Late last week part of our indexing system underwent a brief outage. During that time a number of blogs experienced a halt in indexing. Since then, fixes have been implemented and indexing is occurring again. However, because of the outage, a backlog has built up in our spider queues. The spider queues keep track of pings as they come in, so no pings were lost, we just have to process them. We are catching up as quickly as we can, but in the meantime, please expect delays in indexing, particularly for those on the Blogspot and Wordpress blog platforms. We appreciate your patience as we catch up and thank you for your understanding.