nonsmokingarea.com

fellow bloggers Infopirat and Datenschmutz’s Ritchie Pettauer (both links german-only) have started a combined link- & Technorati-favorites exchange (the more readers favor your blog, the higher your authority calculated by Technorati). to get a Technorati-favorite from me, just backlink to this post and add my blog to your favorites - voila! as soon as I find your backlink I’ll add your blog to my favorites as well. more participants after the fold…
(more…)

endless.com - Amazon’s speciality shopping site for handbags and shoes is the eCommerce giant’s answer to niche-site like.com - though it lacks adavanced features like visual search.

two years ago, Technorati was one of the first sites to introduce the concept of tagging (aka ‘folksonomy’, a term relating to taxonomy). a good time for an update of their tag-pages…

earlier than probably expected by most, Linden Labs released the source-code of their SecondLife client under GPLv2 today. while this move already earned a lot of praise among the community, the biggest steps towards an open virtual world - i.e. opening up backend-services and grid-servers - is yet to be done. on the downside, it remains to be seen how this affects the already shattered stability of SecondLife in the short term.

rumours of Yahoo! aquiring MyBlogLog seem to get a second rehash…bloggers seem to remain more skeptical this time

more news from Yahoo! at Read/WriteWeb: Yahoo! Go 2.0 is the company’s answer to Google’s latest mobile efforts like their mobile Gmail-app. the java-based mobile client integrates various Yahoo!-services like search, maps, mail, photos (flickr) and news.

Technorati recently went meta by adding a ‘Popular’ section, which is aggregating the most prominently blogged proponents in the categories Music, Internet Video, Movies and News. interestingly, their categorization seems to be based on links to authorative platforms like amazon.com, imdb.com and youtube.com. not really sure, but I guess this could mean that f.e. music-related posts referencing less known artists might not be considered in Technorati’s most popular at all. that’s probably not so bad, as such artists might not appear in the top-ranking anyway - but what about videos posted on other sites than youtube?

in other news, TechMeme - pioneer and probably still leader of the aggregating-pack - and siblings memeorandum (politics), Ballbug (baseball only) and WeSmirch (celebrity gossip) went mobile earlier this week (though Gabe Rivera, TechMeme-creator, prefers the term ‘Mini’). all sites now offer a more condensed version for reading on small screens by adding ‘/mini’ to their respective URLs.

superficial observation might suggest that blog-search & -indexing is a problem solved long time ago - after all we have specialised blog search-engines like Technorati, sphere and Icerocket. however, Technorati - blog-search pioneer and defacto market-leader - is afflicted by repeated technical problems (like randomly “forgetting” to index blogs for weeks - just google for wordpress + technorati + troubles) and performance-issues (after all, a ping after updating your blog should lead to almost immediately updated indizes, and not lagging several hours behind). another problem Technorati shares with all its competitors is the uphill combat against spam-blogs (aka ’splogs’) & replica-blogs. [disclaimer: in no way this should be a rant against Technorati - I'm using the service almost daily and don't see any real alternative at the moment]

you might suppose Google should’nt really have a problem to establish their very own kick ass blog-index, but like their online RSS-reader, which has only gained attention after its recent major upgrade, blogsearch.google.com has been living quite below the blogosphere’s radar. according to the screenshot (see below) blogger Andy Boyd has posted today, this might be subject to change in the very near future: in what might be a local beta-rollout, Andy seems to have received results from blogsearch mixed within the general results from google.com:

TechCrunch points out that this might be a “believable scenario because Google recently added blog search to Google News last month and to Google Alerts four days later”. indeed, Google would be the first mainstream search-engine to specifically incorporate blog-posts into their search-results. a great boost for the blogosphere in general, and smaller bloggers - holding a lower page-rank - in particular could be anticipated. so let’s sit back and see what’s coming (soon, hopefully) on google.com…:)

update: here’s what Google Blogscoped has to say about this:

Also, I wonder how Google wants to decide on quality for these blog links – surely they can’t allow any recently updated spam blog to inhibit this spot, but for very fresh posts it might also be hard to rank this in terms of backlinks… unless they manage to count blog-post backlinks in near real-time.

just in time for its third birthday, RSS-search-engine and -syndication-site Technorati received a major overhaul today (details are found at the Technorati-blog). despite the new design seems lighter (though a bit too colourful) and more aimed towards the live-web-newbie, the frontpage still fails to communicate Technorati’s unique selling point over conventional search engines in clear words - non-bloggers won’t see why they should use Technorati for search. on the upside, there is a new ‘discover’-section, an improved ‘popular’-section (including the infamous a-list of bloggers) and better management of your favorite blogs (read customization). what’s still missing to make Technorati the single-most important tool for many bloggers, is an integrated feed-reader. behind the curtains, the Technorati-developers also improved the index-algorithms in terms of ‘live-ness’ and accuracy (more on TechCrunch).

if you’ve never used Technorati, you might want to check out the profile of this blog

Guy Kawasaki asks David Sifry - CEO and founder of Technorati - 10 questions about the blog-searchengine and blogging in general. in case you wonder what distincts a blog-searchengine from classic web-search: while google & co. let their spiders visit each and every website once every 1-3 days (depending on relevancy, i.e. google-rank) to index fresh content, Technorati works the other way round: the moment a blogger hits the ‘publish’-button, the blogging-system notifies (’pings’) Technorati and other blog-searchengines of the new post. ideally this leads to an index which is always up-to-date.
competitors include Icerocket and Sphere, still Technorati is favoured by most bloggers, probably because of the ranking-algortihm and top-blogs-list.