How To Claim Your Blog on Technorati

I decided to submit Mind Mole to Technorati (a massive blog search engine) in order to give it a bit more exposure and hopefully to gain some more readers. Here I will run through the simple process I went through to do this.

First off, head over to http://technorati.com/ and set up an account. This is pretty standard really, username, password and all that. I was then sent an email where I had to click a link to activate my account. Simple as that, I had a profile which I could customise with a picture and brief bio etc.

Now on to the important stuff, claiming your blog. At the bottom of your profile you can enter the url of your blog and then submit a claim. You can add a title and a description of the content on the next page, as well as some tags. Once you're done, Technorati send you an email which includes a claim token. This is so they can verify you are actually the author of the blog. All you have to do is submit a post on your blog and include the token code. You can take this post down again after a few minutes if you want to so don't worry about it ruining your blog's content. My code was D346NZAKQ77B. Once the post is submitted to your blog, on your Technorati profile click "Check Claim" and then "Verify Claim Token". You should then get another email saying they have successfully found the claim token and your blog will officially be yours in Technorati's eyes.

All that's left to do is sit back and watch as the hits come rolling in.....

Or so I thought.  It turns out Technorati is rubbish and no-one uses it anymore.  Oh well, that was a waste of time.

Web Culture

As mentioned in my previous post, Uses and Gratifications, the web has created a new culture (or even cultures) that is inconsistent with the offline world. Baym (1999) considers four aspects of this:

• New forms of expression
• New forms of identity
• New relationships
• New behavioural norm
  

Here I will discuss the first two.

Identity on the internet is created in a number of ways. Avatars, nicknames and signatures are all tools for people to portray themselves online. They empower people to create an online identity that resembles their authentic selves, free from the restrictions they face offline. Similar to the way people offline buy products that portray certain qualities, people make use of images and quotes online that create specific associations.

People have also developed new ways to express themselves online. The degree of anonymity allows a freedom of expression that doesn’t exist offline. People can say as they please without fear of repercussions. Acronyms have become popular for frequently mentioned phrases (STFU, ROFL, IMHO and RTFM to name but a few) as well as emoticons. The common use of the “f” word is a signal of this freedom.

In my latest IMS seminar, we were asked to mock up an ad which appropriates a popular internet meme (a sort of viral inside joke) or online expression. Here is my first attempt that plays on the ceiling cat meme.

I’ll link to everyone else’s when they have been presented, but in the meantime feel free to comment on my ad or even share some of your own.