Grounded In Reality

It has been 36 hours since the Technorati refresh and my team has been generally pleased with the new, speedy Technorati.  Here are some observations:

• Use search.technorati.com (or s.technorati.com) for a targeted blog-only search and, more importantly, to have the ability to filter by authority.  The authority filter, which has been removed from the general user interface, is a useful tool to narrow down the universe of blog posts to the most influential bloggers.
• The authority filter can also be exposed when using Advanced Search.
• Text and image ads are taking up more real estate—an opportunity for clients to execute smart keyword and banner ad buys, particularly when there is a spike in the news or search volume.
• To perform a keyword search within a select group of blogs: Sign into your Technorati account, create a list of Favorites, and use the search function to find posts (from a pre-defined list of blogs) that contain your keywords.  This is not a new functionality, but I noticed that I can no longer force an RSS feed for this search.  I’ll need to look for a workaround.

Lastly, check out the Technorati Kitchen for new stuff that the Technorati team is cooking up, particularly microformats.