Scrappy Genealogist Learns to Blog – What is Technorati?

Time to celebrate! Technorati approved my claim, which means my blog exists (thank goodness) in their universe. Still I wonder what it means for The Scrappy Genealogist blog.

A search for the question “What is Technorati?” brought me to a blog post by The Design Intelligencer. It explains that Technorati is a directory for blogs and gives practical information about how to use it. 

Technorati is a social media website through which blogs can be searched and receive ratings. This time when I searched their site for genealogy related blogs, 627 blogs popped up. Each blog is given an authority on a scale of 1 to 1000. The highest rated genealogy blog had an authority of 493 (out of 1000), while the lowest had an authority of 1. I couldn't help myself (could you?), so I searched for The Scrappy Genealogist. Actually first I searched in the blogs with an authority of 1, but it wasn't there. Okay, I thought, it makes sense if it doesn’t have any authority at all yet, but surprisingly it was there with an authority of 126. What?

I just started blogging. How could I have a relatively high authority among the genealogy blogs listed? To try to find the answer I did a little digging. None of those I consider to be the big genealogy related bloggers are listed. Uh, oh...do they know something that I don’t? In fact, I only recognized a couple of the blog titles. Although the big names are absent from Technorati, there are lots of wonderful blogs registered, which would be fun to browse.

What I think is that Technorati can be a useful forum for getting your blog read, something that the big names don’t need. A search on Google for the term genealogy nets 31,500,000 results. There is no way my blog would be found in that ocean. To me Technorati is a smaller pond with a lot fewer fish, where if you work hard on posts relevant to your subject, your blog can get noticed and read. Getting noticed and read can only be a good thing.

Next up is Technorati Tags, the whole reason I signed up for this Technorati adventure in the first place. I’ll let you know what I find out.

Scrappy Gen