Technorati is Cool!

If you're not familiar with Technorati, its a very cool (free) service that crawls and indexes the blogosphere and then provides a search engine on top of its results. It also understands the relationship between blogs, in a way - like how blogs are connected via reference. A simplistic view, but pretty accurate, I think.

Anyway, a great feature of Technorati is the ability to set up a Watchlist, which is in effect an agent that automatically watches the world of blogs for a search term or terms you specify and then notifies you about hits via RSS. Sounded slick - I thought I'd try it to see what happens.

Well, first of all, when its working well it seems to be updated very promptly. Second, when its working well the Watchlists are updated quickly. Third, when its working well, you find out stuff in near-real time, like for instance that there's a new edition of Students of the Unusual hitting the streets this week. Pretty cool!

I stress "when its working well" only because I'm scratching my head about something that doesn't seem to be working well with the service. My blog, blahgkarma, is "claimed" by me in Technorati. And I tell Technorati manually when I update the blog (this should be unnecessary, but I do it anyway). But when I do a search on Technorati for blahgkarma, the newest results (i.e the posts I see) are from thirty days ago, and its always the same four posts. But if I put in a string that appears within a given post, I get the result, and fast - like within 10 minutes of making the post in some cases. Wierd. I've reported it but haven't heard anything. You can't bitch when the service is free, so I'm not.

I like the service, and who knows - maybe I did something wrong when I added the Technorati code to my site template. Either way, the Watchlist feature seems to be very working well, and quickly - the blog entry from Comic List it notified me of was made only a few hours earlier. How's that for speed?

Rock on, Technorati.


update: another Students of the Unusual mention at the Little Terrors blog... the comics are generating buzz, which is great for Pat and Terry. Congrats, guys, and BTW - Technorati Watchlists RULE.