How to Get the Most Out of Technorati's RSS Feeds

As I mentioned in a prior post, Technorati has integrated RSS feeds throughout the system. I can't underscore how invaluable this is. It's making me smarter about the topics I care about. Here's a bunch of tips that you might find helpful. (Technorati is an Edelman partner.)

Track When a Blogger Discusses a Particular Subject

Let's say you read a blog like Boing Boing that covers a diversity of topics, but you only really care when they talk about Google. You can use Technorati to set up a feed to bring you only these posts. First, find Boing Boing in the blog directory. Next enter a term in the search box. The search will turn up this page of results. There will be a link to the feed on the right side of the page.

Drill Down Deep Into Your Favorite Blogs

Technorati has a great feature called Favorites. Basically, it's a way to roll-up the blogs you care about the most. The neat thing is that once you set this up you can build some nice feeds.

For starters, you can get an RSS feed for all posts from your favorites. Here's a feed for mine. I stick this feed on my various start pages - like Live.com.

Second, similar to my first tip, you can set up search feeds within your favorites or anyone else's for that matter. Here's a search within my favorites for links to Apple.com. It generates this feed. Here's another from David Sifry's favorites.

Track Memes That Others Don't Follow

Tailrank, Techmeme and the like are terrific but as I mentioned earlier this week, they're somewhat exclusionary. Technorati has dozens of memetrackers that drill down into subjects these other sites don't cover. For example, these include basketball, food and health. Everyone one of these has a feed. Here's the RSS feed for the health memetracker.

Bucket Your Influencers Into Different Feeds

Technorati has the capability to limit a search to blogs that have attained a certain level of authority. There are four levels: any authority (covering all blogs), a little authority (covering blogs with just a few links and up), some authority (tens of links) and a lot of authority (hundreds). Once you set up a smart search you can subscribe to that feed. So for example, if I want to track Wikipedia - which I do - I can limit my search to blogs with some authority and subscribe to that feed. (Also, in related news,  Technorati made a slight design change to search pages to break down results by time.)

Tags: Technorati

Comments

[NitinK]

Steve:

This is a terrific idea! It makes it really easy to keep up with very specific topics in the blogosphere.

A related tip for folks - it's easy to do this also with most of the search engines. In my case, I'm interested in the topic "vertical search" - so I have feeds set up in my feed reader that directly receive the output of search results feeds from Google blog search, Sphere et al. For example, the Google blog search feed for vertical search comes from this url: http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch_feeds?hl=en&q=vertical+search&ie=utf-8&num=10&output=atom. (I had to break it into two lines, couldn't use the anchor tag in comments.)

Hope this helps!

P.S. You have a great blog, btw - I'm a regular reader!

[Hu Dou]

Not sure whether trackback is working since I don't see it. Anyway, here is the link to my comment:http://tigerhead.wordpress.com/2006/10/13/rss-use-cases/

[VeraBass]

I do like and use the Technorati range of selectivity for faster daily news review.

On days when I've a bit of time for it, though, I've found some of my favorite posts on blogs with No Authority by tasting a personal favorite blog's roll. The idea of popularity being synonymous with Authority and, indirectly, with value of content, drives me personally Boing Boing. It doesn't just weed the pros out from non-professional bloggers like me, but naturally favors those pros whose online marketing skills are as good as or occasionally even better than their content.

Vera

[Anand]

The biggest problem with Technorati has been that a lot of junk/spam blogs get into the search results. The ability to restrict results by authority should hopefully solve some of these problems. But as Vik points out in the comment above, if inbound links are used as a proxy for authority, it is easy for spolgs (who BTW, are great at online marketing tactics) to game the system.

Full Discolsure: I work for a company that recently launched a memetracker that tracks hundreds of topics. We're using a combination of human editors and algorithms to solve the splog problem.

[bill perry]

So, let me get this straight? I know that I can search on technorati for a list of sites that links to my own. I can set up a feed to monitor this as well, so I don't have to check the actual technorati page every day?

Bill

[Steve Rubel]

Bill, that's correct.