Technorati tagging

Filed under: Journaling
3 Comments

In case anyone's wondering about my "Technorati tag" lines in the WisCon entries, the idea is that you attach a label, called a "tag," to your entries in a particular way, and then you tell Technorati (a site that indexes and tracks blogs) that you've posted the entry, and Technorati lets people search for all entries (in all blogs) that contain that tag.

So for example if you search at Technorati for the "wiscon" tag, then you'll see Scalzi's photos and Meghan's photos as well as blog entries from me, Cheryl, Patrick S, et alia.

Sadly, you can apply Technorati tags to your own blog only if your blog and/or its feed are set up in a particular way. If you're not using a major common blogging system (like Movable Type or LJ), then you may have to do some configuration before you can follow the below procedure. For example, I don't think JournalScape is set up to be visible to Technorati (but I could be wrong). (Mary Anne and Dan, I think the below procedure should work now with your journals.) For techies who want to configure their blog systems to work with Technorati tags, see the end of this entry.

If you do use a major common blogging system, and if you want your WisCon entries to show up when someone searches for WisCon entries at Technorati, then do the following (try it with one entry first to make sure it works, before you do it with all entries):

  1. In each of your journal entries that are about WisCon, add the following line:
    Technorati tag: <a href="http://technorati.com/tag/wiscon" rel="tag">wiscon</a>.
  2. Ping Technorati by going to the Ping Us page and typing the URL of your blog's main page, to let them know that there's new content for them to index.

Your entry should show up on Technorati's wiscon tag page within a few minutes.

Technical notes for blog-system developers/maintainers:

For info about setting up your blog to work with Technorati, see the developer tag help page and its sub-pages, especially the following:

The general idea is that you have to put appropriate link tags on your blog's main page to expose the RSS or Atom feed, then you have to make the tags appear appropriately in the RSS or Atom code. If you need help with this you can ask me, but I haven't looked at it in a while; you may be best off looking at the link tags in my journal's main page, and at my RSS and/or Atom feeds.

3 Responses to “Technorati tagging”

  1. Cheryl

    Kevin is complaining that his Baycon posts are not appearing on Technorati even though he has tagged them all. Does anyone know if LJ users have to do something special?

  2. Jed

    I forgot that LJ has a tagging system these days. I was going to say that I thought Technorati wouldn’t understand LJ’s tagging system, but on further examination I think it’s supposed to; it sorta looks like if you apply an LJ tag to a post, Technorati is supposed to be able to treat that as a Technorati tag.

    Did Kevin ping Technorati with the main page of his LJ? (Not an individual entry page.)

    If so, then I’m at a loss. I recommend dropping a note to Technorati tech support to see whether they automatically recognize LJ’s tags or whether one needs to do something special to make that happen. Unfortunately, writing to Technorati tech support may mean waiting for two weeks (or forever) to hear back from them.

    Anyone else have any info on LJ/Technorati interaction?

    Btw, it appears that Technorati is supposed to recognize the category system used by Movable Type and some other blogging systems. So if you have a “wiscon” category in your blog, you may not need to do any of the manual tagging stuff I described. I’m still gonna use manual tags, though, ’cause my category hierarchy doesn’t get specific enough to include “wiscon” per se.

  3. Cheryl

    Yep, that worked. So Technorati will find LJ posts, but only if you register the journal with them first.

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