How to Find a Blogger's Beat

Technorati has started an effort to catalogue bloggers by topic. This is welcome, but Technorati's solution so far is not really working that well. The reason is that bloggers - rather than users - choose their tags. This makes it really easy for a blogger like me to claim that I am #1 for knitting, even though I have never touched the subject. I personally wouldn't do this since it's dishonest, still, there's nothing in the current Technorati system that would stop a blogger with a lot of links from trying.

A better way to find a blogger's "beat" is through keyword density. These tools identify the keywords that are most dominant ones on a given Web site. For example, here's a sample report for MarketingVOX.

Comments

[Elisa Camahort]

Well, sure that tool might be interesting to analyze web sites you already know about. I think the main point of the Trati tool is to find blogs you don't know about.

I agree that dishonest people can try to game the system, but at least for now at least automatically generated and updated splogs won't clutter up the results like they do on Trati keyword searches.

(Only a matter of time before they figure it out though, I'm sure.)

[David Sifry]

Steve,

That's why Blog Finder is in Beta - we wanted to get it out to the world so that people could bang on it and make great suggestions like yours.

Thanks!

Dave