Thursday, November 28, 2002

Rank your reasons for thanks

Here's a new link for your blogroll: Technorati. Created by David Sifry, the founding hacker (or is it hacking founder?) of Linuxcare, Sputnik, and other fine efforts.

David has been quietly showing me Technorati over the last week or so while it's been in development; and I've been waiting eagerly for him to finally unveil one of the coolest blogging accessories ever put in a browser.

If you've ever watched your referer logs, you're going to dig how far Techorati goes beyond them — all the way out to the cosmos, which is your new blog buzzword. Here's my own, ranked by freshness. And here it is again, ranked by authority.

The folks at Suroc Escape Committee (aka fongueusemare) are surprised to find me linking to them, and probably just as surprised to see me making comments on their posts.

How did I find them? On my fresh cosmos list in Technorati.

In a week David has populated a database with around12 thousand blogs and over 1.3 million links.

It's interesting to compare his Top 100 Technorati with the Blogging Ecosystem, since both survey a similar number of blogs.

Google Juice tells you how a given URL does in searches for specific terms. (e.g., mine is #6 on a search for "weblog.") Google Rank lays out the whole list for the search term, and shows you whether each result has moved up, moved down or stayed unchanged.

One of the coolest features is this one: it's full of freebies, but it's also commercial. For $5/year, you can set up a watchlist to keep track of happening stuff. My watchlist, for example, told me today that Politics and Blogs linked to something I wrote.

I could go on. Better you should explore. And give thanks to David for a job well done.

This blogging life

Nice piece by Lisa Guernsey in the New York Times: Telling All Online: It's a Man's World, (Isn't It?). I like the pic of Jeneane (with kid & cat). Even if she wasn't already the top Jeneane on Google, this item should nail her there.

The piece features (linked in itsy type in a box to the side) a 'roll of sixteen blogs, starting with Marc Canter's. Fun to see the big guy listed ahead of Glenn Reynolds, Andrew Sullivan and other usual suspects. Not a knock on those guys — they're all primo 'n shit — but reading Marc is like taking a sangria shower. You get your ass baptized in fun and flavor.

Can you tell I've been drinking? Not a common thing. Chianti, if you need to know. Hey, it's Thanksgiving. Salut.