After a week long sabbatical from posting here, I am back today. The broadband is gone, and Tata Indicom shows no signs of trying to get it up and running soon. Apart from shifting, going to vsnl’s office everyday, watching some movies and drinking a lot, I have managed to create an application to use technorati ranks to plot and find out the best of the Indian Blogs scattered around the internet.
Sometime back I did a post on the top blogs in the Indian Blogosphere (link). The rankings on that post, were based on Alexa. A lot of people suggested that Alexa was probably not the best way to rank and preferred using Technorati for the purpose. So I decided to re-do the whole exercise via Technorati, and in the process creating an automated solution for the same.
There were a lot of other reasons I chose Technorati. And I’m going to list them here:
First of all Alexa has been acting like a mean kid. They have adopted a lot of changes brought about by Statsaholic into their own site (Read Stolen), and have tried to completely shut it down. That is a pity, because I really loved Statsaholic.
Secondly, I was looking to create an automated solution, and (mean kid)Alexa charge for using their API’s. Other than the fact that their stats aren’t exactly accurate, charging for something like that is a sure way to say that it is not meant to be used by enthusiasts. So I decided to use the API’s from somebody more rational.
Thirdly, Technorati, unlike Alexa, gives out the most accurate description of what they measure. For those of you who are not aware, Technorati is a great service which keep a track of inter linking amongst blogs. Currently they track over 55 million blogs. You can use it to find out which blogs are linking to your blog or to your post or you can use it to find out which are the most linked blogs on the internet.
Lastly, Technorati’s API’s are simple, fast and free. This is why I decided to start using Technorati for my application.
Now coming on the main application. It is called Ploterati, and the main idea is to create plots out of your technorati rankings. Since it is still in it’s beta, I have decided to start covering only Indian blogs for the moment.
Ploterati ranks the blogs based on their Technorati Rank. Also, it allows blogs to plot their ranks, over a period of three months.
I have already added the first list of blogs which were present in this post, but you are free to recommend any more blogs by using the contact form on this page, or on the link on the right top of the Ploterati Page. Adding the blogs has not been made open yet, because I still need to test how much load the server can take. However, it should soon become automated.
The plots are currently not visible, but they will be after the end of three months, when I have filled up my database with enough values to be able to plot intelligent graphs.
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Technorati tags :Ploterati
