Technorati

Technorati is an extensive blog directory that includes several categories. Some of the best represented blog categories include Living with over 58,000 blogs; Technology with over 48,000 blogs; Entertainment with over 46,000 blogs; and Business with over 40,000 blogs. Sports, Science, Politics, and Green are also all well represented, each with over 13,000 blogs. There are over 1,300,000 blogs in all.

Also pretty cool: Technorati keeps track of the top 100 most influential blogs on the web and calculates an authority number based on the number of people linking to a particular blog. A blog with a high authority number is considered more trustworthy than the average blog.

Blogs that are not well represented include non-English language blogs, which are not included at all. Education blogs are represented but not in the tens of thousands like several other categories. Also, several of the education links I tried didn’t work correctly. There was only one functioning link to a blog on howler monkeys.

There are two different search options; Blogs and Posts. A Blog search brings up blogs about your indicated search topic. A Post search brings up posts within blogs on your indicated search topic. I found that often the Post search is more helpful because you can get more specific information. If you want general information then a Blog search is good. Specific information can also be found doing a Blog search but it requires more reading within a blog as well as visiting more blogs to find what you’re looking for.

In 2008 Tchnorati acquired an online advertising agency, which makes me wonder if its choice of top 100 most influential blogs is influenced by its advertising interests. I hope this isn’t true. Either way, this site is a great resource; unless you’re interested in howler monkeys.