Cathy Nelson’s Professional Thoughts

Every now an again I check my blog stats–what little the freebie Edublogs platform offers–to see how I’m doing in Technorati.  It was a good while back that I became familiar with the concept of Technorati and what it does. I learned how to find bloggers who wrote about topics I was interested in, and suddenly kind of figured out what “tagging” was really all about, particularly from Technorati and Hitchhikr.  The tags for conferences like BLC allowed me to virtually attend, even garnering an invitation from David Jakes to join in the conversations at this summer’s BLC.  What a blast!  But I also figured out that in Technorati I had to claim my blog, and ping the site as I made posts.  It was through my Technorati profile that I began to realize that the more other blogs mention you (in postings or blogrolls) that your authority would go up.  So recently I began a campaign to see if I could raise my authority (how very selfish of me!!)  I knew some of that authority was b/c I was cross-posting and referencing things I had blogged about over here on TechnoTuesday on the SCASL Blog, where I am a contributing member.  But recently I took some time to see where else my authority was coming from.  I can thank some virtual friends (David Jakes, Darren Draper, Joyce Valenza, Rob Darrow, Woody DeLauber, Dean Shareski and many more) –some of whom I’ve NEVER met personally, and yet some I met casually at NECC ‘07 and probably didn’t register a blip on any radars then (due to being so blogger star-struck)… Many of these same bloggers are Twitter friends as well, so I feel safe in referring to them as friends, at least in the virtual sense in the very least.  Anyway, I worked a week or so ago to get some RL friends to add me to their blogrolls (thanks Chris, Maryann, Tim & John) to see if I would get a boost.  Well, low and behold, my authority is now a whopping 36, whatever that means.  I still haven’t quite grasped Authority or Page Rank in Technorati, but I think 36 means I’m not quite ready for any Edublogs 2007 Awards (or any other year for that matter. But I did learn something about blog manipulation. Maybe one of my friends can explain this to me as well.