Dave Sifry, another of my heroes, is listing some of Technorati’s stats: 1.6M sources, a new weblog every 8 seconds, the index updated within 7 mins of a posting. [I’m here even though I alsoreally wanted to see Eric Boabeau‘s talk] [Damn! My first draft of this put this badly! I left the “also” out of the previous sentence. I’m here because Technorati is so damn cool and interesting. And so is Eric.]

Dave shows a hack he created last night: A list of the top products discussed in the last 24 hours. He has us post to our blogs about it to see how quickly our links show up in Technorati. Answer: Three minutes.

“Everyone talks about the power law. I said, Fuck it, I have the data.” He charted Technorati ranking against the number of inbound links. “All the power laws says is that when it’s easy for anybody to publish, by its very nature, you’re going to have a curve with a relatively small number of things that are well-linked by a lot of people.” What’s really interesting is the tail. Even #100,000 has five inbound links. “This is an inclusive community. Not everyone has to be on the A-List for this to be an effective medium.”

This page charts Technorati ranking against the total number of inbound links for people who have that ranking. [No, I don’t understand that.] The aggregate number of links down the curve greatly outweighs the number of the top 100. There are a lot more little clusters than big clusters.

“How can we help people use this service in new and creative ways? Everytime we come out with a major HTML feature, we’ll come out with an XML API as well, free for non-commmercial use.” Dave lists some hacks that have been done: Joi Ito gets IM/SMS notificatiosn of new links. Movable Type plugins. Threading on weblog reads (newsmonster, newsgator, blosxom).

If you want your stuff indexed fast, use the high-priority indexer: http://www.tefchnorati.com/pinger.

Future: Open reviews (RVW format). Subscribe to keywords.

Dave describes a way to get notified whenever a blog you care about is updated, by combining notification, IM and RSS. In his example, we see, on Technorati, Dave’s blogroll with notifications of updates. “This is part of making the blog reading experience more conversational.”

Vote links (an idea from Kevin Marks) lets you add a tag (“vote=”) inside the link that says that the vote is 0,1, or -1. This lets you link to someone you dislike without implicitly giving them more authority.

Technorati is also aware of geoURLs.

Categories: Uncategorized dw