Tagging, Links and Technorati

Technorati is an aggregator: they collect blogs and posts and links, and organize them for representation, primarily based on the tag. A tag is just what it looks like, it's a hyperlink (a URL or Uniform Resource Locator), the thing that makes the "web" in world wide web.

A Technorati Tag is a special tag of the URL/link sort that Technorati uses to index your work, organize and present it back out to people who are interested in the subject you're tagging. (Not necessarily what you're blogging, but primarily what you tag your blog to say.

(Hey, do you remember what the word tag above looks like to your browser? It looks like this: tag . Ok, just checking. Quiz over)

If you create an account on Technorati here and register your blog here (wait, don't click the second here until you register your account), then you are ready to begin. You don't need an account to use Technorati to find other blogs, but you need one if you want people to use it to find you.

Once you have created your account, you'll be assed to "claim" you blog. Just enter the URL and submit it. Once you've claimed it, Technorati will begin to track it. Blogger (and a lot of other blogging software and hosting sites) will automatically "ping" Technorati when you save or significantly update a post.

Pinging just means that your blog software probably sends a message to Technorati every time you save a new post. More on this laster.

Technorati will also ask you to paste some HTML code into your template somewhere(remember Hyper Text Markup Language from the last lesson? Of course you don't. Doesn't matter.) If you haven't been into your template before, or if you have and it scares you as much as looking under the hood of your car, we'll save that for another lesson. I believe Technorati will work just fine without it.

Anyway, once you have registered your blog, if your site "pings" then Technorati will come "crawl" (read) you blog, find your tags, and note your post as linked to those tags. Once that is done, people who are looking for recent blog posts about say, "Mermaids" will find Traveling Mermaid, *if* she has a tag that looks like this:

Mermaids

You can put all of these at the end like I do, or you can embed them into the text of your blog post about Mermaids.

Once you have Technorati tags in your post, either appended or embedded in the main post, you are on your way to being noticed by people who use Technorati to find blogs on subjects of interest to them.

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