Technorati

When we started working on this feature, I was still a blogging technogy neophyte, although I was extremely familiar with the basics of the LAMP platform: Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP, Perl and Python (see other sidebar). I had investigated hosted services like Blogger and I had an account on Advogato, and when I wanted more power at my fingertips I set up my own blog using Movable Type, but I was primarily a blog software consumer. Not a supplier.

But after I set up our experimental blog server (much thanks to Penguin Computing for that one), and installed Moveable Type, I found myself hacking some shortcuts to the system. To make it easier to post articles, for example, I wrote myself an email-to-blog and jabber-to-blog set of interfaces -- hacks that let me use my preferred email client for blog postings. (I've always maintained that the web browser is a lousy web services client -- something we all intuitively know whenever we have to fill out a long form on the web.)

The more I played around with with the system, and with the enabling technologies behind all the blogging systems out there (e.g. RSS, XML-RPC and the Google and Blogger APIs) I started thinking more seriously about the kinds of Web services I'd like to see as a regular blogger. So I created Technorati: a new site that provides the four Web services I most wanted to see. Here they are:

  1. Link Cosmos lists the "cosmos" of blogs currently linking in to a given blog (or any arbitrary URL). Many of these links don't result in immediate traffic, so they don't show up in referer logs. This service detects the links shortly after they're made (since they send out an RSS notification when they're saved).
  2. Google Rank shows you the top 100 sites on Google for any search term. Technorati also goes back day after day and rechecks Google's rankings for that search term, so you can also see how Google's rankings change over time.
  3. Google Juice gives you the ranking for a blog (or set of blogs) you want to track. If your blog is in the top 1000 Google responses, Google Juice will find your blog and give you its ranking for that set of search terms.
  4. Watchlists are an easy way to keep and track historical information about the blogs and other sites you're tracking. They allow you to quickly see new inbound links and historical Google ranking information not shown in the standard views.

Watchlists are a premium service. For $5/year ($10 if you also want the RSS feed), you can purchase access to the watchlist web service. You get instant access to the live watchlist information via a RSS feed, and you can also get a daily email with all of the updates to the sites or Google Rankings that you're tracking. In the several days it's been up, Technorati has produced about $250. (It has also visited the top spot on Daypop and Blogdex.)

Technorati is both brand new (as I write this), a work in progress, and the product of 3 weekends of hacking. It wouldn't be possible without the growing plethora of open source tools and open protocols that are available to the blogging community (and products of that community). I used a LAMP combination (see other sidebar) with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP for the live scripting and Perl for the backend web robot and other backend tasks. XML-RPC pings are what power the activation of the web spider, so that Technorati is always full of up-to-date information, and it exports RSS feeds for people who wish to view Technorati output in a more structured format, like a RSS browser. Payment and billing are performed using PayPal's open APIs, which use HTTP POST methods to easily perform credit card processing and billing.

We stand on the shoulders of giants in this world. So I'll credit Dave Winer, who wrote XML-RPC and was a significant participant in SOAP and RSS, Ben and Mena Trott, who wrote Movable Type, Rasmus Lerdorf and many others who developed PHP, Larry Wall and many others who developed Perl, the entire Apache team, Monty Widenius and David Axmark and the MySQL development team, the folks behind the Google API, Evan Williams and the Blogger team behind the Blogger API, and of course, Linus Torvalds and the Linux development community.

Hey, if I can do it, so can you!

- David Sifry