Library clips

I mentioned Technorati Explore the other day, it produces latest posts in the blogosphere, according to a topic.

How are the blogs chosen and how are posts categorised?
From my estimate the ground work is already done, blogs that register with Technorati describe their blog with topics they specialise in…this is Technorati Blog Finder.

I gather if 10 blogs register to be experts in “OPML”, all you will see are posts from 10 blogs in the blogosphere about “OPML”…so the topics seem to be based on user tags (this is great) but what about if there are some great posts about “OPML” but these blogs haven’t described their blogs with the topic “OPML”, as it may be a one off post. I guess these posts may be picked up by Technorati Tags, if they have tagged their post as such, and what if they haven’t.

Maybe on the Technorati Explore page there could be a link to see posts about this topic from the whole blogosphere (not just from blog experts on the topic such as in Technorati Explore)…all this requires is a link to Technorati Tags for that topic.

So it seems to be a condensed version of Technorati Tags, as the Technorati Blog Finder tags are more focused in a way that you can be confident that all content will be authored by claimed experts, so it becomes a type of specialised subject news portal…just choose your subject.

But what about if I have 10 tags describing my blog, then a post about “RSS” will show up when people are exploring posts about “Libraries” as I blog about both…this has an element of noise.

At first I thought Technorati Explore will map posts from your blog category to the Explore topic so it will categorise posts from your blog as you do. But as it turns out this doesn’t happen, and the topics describing your blog don’t have to be your blog categories (this is default the first time you register), you can manually add topics yourself to describe your blog.
What I mean is that if I describe my blog in Technorati Blog Finder as specialising in RSS, Libraries, etc…if I did a post about “Libraries” you would still see this when viewing posts about “RSS” in Technorati Explore, can’t some mapping be done (eg. Technorati Tags) to exclude those posts from my blog that aren’t about that topic.

Here is the topic for OPML, you will notice there are many posts that are not about OPML.
It seems to be a hard feat to achieve when the topics are precise or narrowly focused, a service like the Corante Hubs, cover more broad topics, like the Web hub, so the posts reflected are easily going to fall within this subject, and of course you can browse posts by topics within this greater topic that is the hub, so if you browse the “OPML” topic within the Corante Web Hub, the posts within are exactly going to be about “OPML” and nothing else.

I posted once that Technorati Tags would be great if you could limit the tags to one blog, or a selection of blogs (kind of like viewing posts from a blog by category, without being at the blog website)…and now I’ve noticed IceRocket Tags is giving this a go.
So like I mentioned before Technorati could base the Technorati Blog Finder tool just on blog categories, and map posts from these categories to Technorati Explore, so when you explore a topic, all the posts will be ABOUT that topic, isn’t this the idea…this is what Corante Hubs do, they take a selection of blogs about a general topic, if you like to examine posts from a more narrow topic, go ahead, you will find all the posts have that exact aboutness.

Like Stowe mentioned in his post, Technorati Explore could also add an editorial blog, as Corante Web Hubs do, to collate and act as another filter of the happenings within the topic.

I just had a thought, if you look at the Corante Web Hub you will notice that the network blogs are blogging a lot about “Web 2.0“, as it scores the top position in the tag cloud sorted by frequency…the tag cloud sorted this way gives us a view of what the network heavily blogs about, the direction it’s heading.
We could take this type of information and think that maybe it may be worthy to start an editorial blog about the “Web 2.0″ topic, because in the future it could grow to so many posts that it could almost be a hub itself…this is just some speculation.

Back to Technorati Explore

At the moment there are no feeds for each topic, this will come soon I bet.

Searching in a topic is available via Technorati Blog Finder.

Posts can be sorted by authority or date, Memeorandum is authority only.

There are the usual cosmos linkbacks but are these enough to collate related stories
…TechCrunch mentions that related links in Memeorandum aren’t only based on incoming links, related items are clustered even without the link love…I guess this is similar to Google News.
(Note: Corante Hubs use IceRocket incoming links and Waypath Related to discover discussion and narrowly related posts for every post)

TechCrunch also mention that Technorati has the upperhand that it can style news for 100’s or 1000’s of topics, whereas Memeorandum is focused on just 2 topics…but as mentioned before the contents in the topics at Technorati isn’t always going to reflect the topic matter.
It also mentions that Technorati will cover the bigger scope of the blogosphere, unlike the select blogs covered by Memorandum (this is another noise filtering, quality control method)…apparently, this also enables Memeorandum to deliver news in more real-time.

[Note: if all the Corante Web Hub blogs added the tag “CoranteWebHub” to their Technorati Blog Finder profiles then this could be an alternate interface…this makes you think that Technorati is no longer just a search engine, but is now organising it’s data as a media service…do copyright issues or money come into the equation]

Personalised Exploring

In the future I’d like to import an OPML into Technorati Explore, so I’m deciding who the blog experts are…the difference to your personal RSS reader is you can explore discussions (FeedFlare is helping in this case), and sort posts by popularity (this is almost possible with Feedster).

Corante Web Hub implications

- Search inside a tag from an OPML file
(IceRocket Tags doesn’t have OPML file import, but you can limit a tag to one URL, so I can’t see why you couldn’t use the OR function to include multiple URL’s)

- See explicit incoming links from just within the web hub
(It would be good if the incoming links were listed, like the related links

…also maybe the incoming links to be listed could be limited to just the blogs from the web hub, ie. to see blog posts from within the web hub linking to each other, then you could click on incoming links to see discussion from the rest of the blogosphere.
How would this work, you’d need to be able to generate incoming links from an OPML file, or use the OR function at Technorati, so you can enter multiple URL’s in the link search field…but this would only give you a stream of incoming links to the web hub blogs from the whole blogosphere, how would you tell it to only show incoming links if they come from a selection of URL’s.

Succinctly, I want to see incoming links for a selection of blogs, only if the links are from the same selection of blogs).

- See explicit similar/related posts from within the hub
(Same idea as above).

These last 2 points may put the web hub editorial blog out of a job, actually it would just make their job easy, as all correlations are automated.

- View the hub by popularity
(eg. OPML Sampler), otherwise a Memeorandum or Technorati Explore for the hub OPML).

…see end of this post.

[ADDED: I just noticed that you can sort topics in Technorati Blog Finder by most recent (shows the latest post, including linkbacks), most authority, and A-Z
…so it seems Technorati Explore does for blog posts what Technorati Blog Finder does for blogs.

I’d like to see an RSS feed in Technorati Blog Finder when sorted by most recent posts in your favourite topic, check out Journalism.
If this had a feed, you could read the latest posts from blogs considered experts in Journalism, as opposed to collecting feeds on Journalism yourself and putting them in your RSS reader, Technorati has already collected the feeds for you.
If you don’t like reading a spliced feed, and prefer to read these feeds individually it would really help if an OPML was provided.]

[ADDED: Technorati Explore doesn’t have an “ALL” category, I’d like to see most linked to blog posts, like they do for their Popular News page]