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Technorati Blog Finder is a new venture into the blog directory scene.

Good thing about this is the blog categories are assigned by the user (up to 20)…the system already suggests 20 categories based from the most frequent categories you use on your blog, but as mentioned you can change these to your liking.

You can search for a category or browse the cloud, the ranking (for the list) or weighting (for the cloud) are still based on the usual most incoming links, so they are like topic based 100 lists.

Otherwise sort by recently updated (this is definitely needed as a blog with heaps of incoming links may stay on top even though they haven’t blogged in a while), or alphabetically (great for those on the bottom to be seen, unless you don’t have many incoming links and your blog starts with “Z”, well then you can’t be helped as of yet).

So they have gone a step further, discovery by topics (and user defined, awesome I’ll just make up some unique category that I’ll claim to be an expert on and rank top of the list, but then no-one will think to look up such a unique category).

…it would be good to subscribe to an RSS of the lastest blogs within a tag, kind of like what Superfan does for Bloglines for a given users account.

But still there is the 2nd step, the ranking issue, how do we view blogs in the opaque web (ie. past the first 100 hits or so where no-one will bother looking)…even though they are in topics, the number of hits within each topic can still be high
…it’s a great step to discover experts or like blogs on a topic, but what about discovering community clouds of conversation and influence.

Not sure how Rojo rank their blogs, but they have a folksonomy both for tagged items/stories, and for organised/tagged feeds (ie. the tags user apply to organise their feeds are made shareable for discovery via a folksonomy)…you can browse the tag cloud (feed directory so to speak), search for a tag, or browse the 1st 10 hits…you can sort by most recent or popularity (this must be most subscribed to in Rojo, instead of incoming links)…you can also choose the tag cloud from “all users”, “contacts”, or “me”

[via TechCrunch]