Technorati Releases Major New Feature

Dave Sifry announced the Technorati Blog Finder this evening. Derek Powazek at Technorati also posts on Blog Finder here.

What is it? It’s a ranked list of blogs. By Tag. David Powazek calls it “a mini Top 100 for any topic you can imagine”.

Here’s Katrina. Here’s Web 2.0. Here’s Skype.

How good is it? I think it has some problems. Tags are publisher created and so publishers will add a lot of them, and will have an incentive to push the envelope on what is considered an appropriate tag for their blog. I believe, for instance, that I could make TechCrunch a very popular cooking site simply by adding the tag “cooking” to the TechCrunch blog.

There are three ways tags are added. Technorati has already tagged “over 2 million blogs” according to Sifry, and that appears to be accurate. The other two way tags are added are via publisher tools (note the text below is tailored to add a “web2.0” tag):

Get in here! To add your blog to this page, claim your blog and add “web2.0” to your blog tags, or put this code on your site.

Technorati did do a pretty good job of selecting tags that describe Techcrunch, however. There are definitely some changes I’d make, but it’s a good start.

The Blog Finder is available as the third tab on Technorati.

At first glance, I actually think I prefer the Rojo approach in this case. Rojo’s lists use tags that readers have used to describe individual posts that a blog has published. See our profile update here for details. I do, however, believe that lists, if they are useful, must be subject based. This is an interesting experiment in solving this problem.

Previous Technorati Posts by TechCrunch: August 17, 2005, August 11, 2005, June 20, 2005 and June 11, 2005