When I first started blogging, I joined Technorati because the name amused me. I honestly didn't even know what they did... it just looked like a blog directory at the time, though they now refer to themselves as a "blog search engine."
Some bloggers swear by this registry service, others complain that it's marketing-driven (but name something that isn't!) and caters only to the "big players. " Well, for whatever it's worth, I can say that I am one tiny player with no ads who has quietly snuck into favorable authority.
Technorati "authority" –- so their developers claim –- measures a site's standing & influence in the blogosphere as this continually evolving communication medium develops. They review incoming and outgoing links, topical conversations across the news and which-bloggers-are-talking-about-what, how often sites are referenced by other sites, and so on.
I sometimes check this when I do general site metrics once per month – but even I missed this one, and an alert reader (Thanks Chris!) had to tell me that Pillow Astronaut cracked the Top 25 in their science directory!
Pillownaut crept slowly up over the past year through the Science Top 100, which was quite flattering enough in one category. Of course, I don't ever hope to compete with the big blogs sponsored by science magazines, as my subject matter is far too... "niche." At the moment I'm hovering around the #18 spot, but of course this can change weekly.
I spent last evening checking out all the other blogs around mine (translation: blowing hours on reading other blogs, which I can now officially call "research") What I found the most interesting was that in the Top 25 blogs, 11 are about cosmology, astronomy and/or space!
Indeed, 7 of the top 10 are about space! That says a great deal about what's on people's minds these days, if not in our budgets. I wish I had time to sift through all 452 currently listed blogs... alas, only so many hours in a rotation.
The big guns, and with good reason, are Wired Science, Universe Today and Bad Astronomy (I heart Phil Plait)... and if you aren't currently reading these blogs, you should be. NASA Watch is also a surefire staple of news in the American space program, if you can stomach the inexplicable Griffin-Bolden Bashing subculture.
Other interesting new finds on this list that I recommend (and have just begun following) for space enthusiasts are Joel Raupe's Lunar Networks, Jack Kennedy's Space Ports, and Ethan Siegal's cleverly named blog, Starts With a Bang! Great reads, all... and worth checking out!
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