I have a number of Google Alerts set. They scour new internet and blog pages for set terms like crime fiction, murder mystery and "mysteries in paradise", and new alerts arrive in my email on a daily basis.Check Google Alerts out here
Anyway today my Google Alert for mysteries in paradise referred to me twice.
Once was for my recent posting headed Locked-Off Murders. I was pleased about that because just recently I seemed to have slipped off the Google Alert radar and it's been telling me about every body else's blog except mine.
The other one I investigated more, because this said
Giles Blunt: The Delicate Storm Bookblog @ the Writer's Cafe
by MYSTERIES in PARADISE. ( 2008-05-24 14:30:00 GMT/2008-01-14 09:20:43 GMT ) [ rss ]. When a copy of Giles Blunt's THE DELICATE STORM arrived, ...
Now what seems to have happened is that a blog called the Writer's Cafe has incorporated a technorati RSS feed in a page about Giles Blunt's THE DELICATE STORM.
You can see the end result here:
http://writerscafe.ca/book_blogs/writers/giles-blunt_the-delicate-storm.php
You will see a link to a couple of my blog postings in the body of the page, and then over in the right hand column another reference, and also one to my friend Sally's blog. These have come in via Google Blog Search, and then there are even more from the loose cyber clan that I belong to: Peter Beyond Borders to name one. The Google Blog Search page offers to create an email alert, a blog search gadget, and a blog search feed on this topic for me.
I investigated the Writer's Cafe further and found that I also part of a similarly constructed page about Ian Rankin's FLESHMARKET CLOSE.
Can anybody explain to me how Technorati works? Is it like Google, busily scraping stuff from new web pages and blogs? I've seen a couple of other references in the Google Alerts to Technorati. I've visited the site, but don't feel a lot wiser.
Anyway, as I said once you have published on the web, you never know where your words will be found. Gives you something to think about doesn't it?
Technorati is the main blog indexer. It used to be all-powerful but has fallen off a lot in recent years due to Google blog search and so on.
ReplyDeleteIf you haven't done this already, Kerrie, it would be an idea to go to Technorati and "claim" your blog. Technorati runs a "blog ranking" system and will automatically rank your blog based on how many links you get to it. Other users will be looking for blogs in the Technorati search window so it is a way to find new readers, also.
Another thing you can do is to make other blogs your "favourites" in Technorati, which helps their ranking and means you can see what they are posting (this system was going before RSS readers were invented or at least in general use, so it was a way that people used to track each others' blogs in those days.)
Of course, now a lot of Technoarti's market dominance has been diluted, but it is still the main dedicated blog search engine/ranker so it is worth having a presence there, and as you have posted, lots of organisations are hooked into it.
Thanks Maxine. I'll give that a go
ReplyDelete