Social Networking news and information

Using Technorati can be a chore.  They are overrun with spam, and the company has yet to find a good way to fix that.  Although, I must add that it's an almost impossible problem.  Technorati is easily gamed and the fact that they are happily the most popular blogsearch doesn't help them in that arena.

But, cheapshots at Technorati aside, using the site can also be the *best* way to guage the opinions of the entire blogosphere (not just those favored ones chosen to appear on techmeme). 

Rubel has some beautiful tips on Technorati searching (he's a mega user):

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.

(snip)

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.)

Lifehacker pointed to it and then reminded us of their earlier Technorati Tips.  Thanks to Steve for continuing to bring us great social influence tracking tips.