Technorati's new Blog Finder beta

A trackback overnight from Josh Hallett took me to his initial commentary of the Technorati Blog Finder, a new service launched in beta yesterday.

This service does look interesting - Technorati say it will enable you to find blogs that frequently write about subjects you're interested in by searching on key words. Tags, in other words.

So what's the difference between this and Technorati's existing tag search capability?

Writing in the Technorati Weblog, Derek Powazek explains it quite clearly:

You know you can use Technorati to find blog posts about anything and everything. But what if you don't want blog posts - what if you want to find entire blogs about a certain subject? That's where the new Technorati Blog Finder comes in.

Blog Finder takes the power of the folksonomy - bottom-up, user-generated tags - and applies it to the Blogosphere. Looking for a blog about nanotechnology, sports, or politics? Look no further. Type in any text, or click on a featured tag, and find blogs on any subject.

[...] By default, the blogs are presented in order of authority, which means highly-linked blogs appear first. So each of these Blog Finder pages is like a mini Top 100 for any topic you can imagine. You can also sort each tag by how recently the blogs have updated, or alphabetical by title.

I haven't yet studied it in any detail. One question in my mind - does it search English-language tags only or those in other languages, now that Technorati itself will list search results from blogs written in a wide range of languages?

There do seem to be some oddities in its accuracy in categorizing, as Josh describes.

Still, it is beta and analyses like Josh's will help Technorati fine-tune the service.

I'll post more once I've had a bit of time with it.

Comments

[David Sifry]

Neville,

Blog Finder is an early beta, and we wanted to get it out to the world so that you can bang on it, give us your comments, and help us to improve it by tagging your blogs with the tags that you want to be listed under. We used post tags as a way to bootstrap the system. Obviously, there are different semantics between post tags and blog tags, but we hypothesized that if you used a tag or category often enough on your blog, that chances are, it would be a good recommended blog tag for you.

By no means is it perfect, and we're also investigating other ways of sorting the data, but in the spirit of release early, release often, we wanted to get this out in front of everybody.

Would love your continued feedback and comments, you can reach me directly at dsifry at technorati dot com as well...

I wrote about it here, btw:

http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000339.html

Dave

[Nevon]

Dave, thanks for those comments. I do plan to take a good look at Blog Finder and post some commentary.