What do you get when you add Technorati + Mahalo + Google? One part human led guide team, one part ranking of individual posts, and one part powerful algorithm that decides what's hot and what's not, based on what is fed into it.

Loud3r.

Today, Loud3r is launching 25 separate sites on 25 different niche topics that range from Motorcycles to Web 2.0. Big deal, right? There are content gathering tools everywhere these days, why bother with this one?

Each of the 25 niche sites is set up to kickstart its own community, with features reminiscent of Digg. You can give feedback on the stories, and it will help their algorithm get smarter. The more sources that the guide feeds the engine, plus the more you interact, the better user experience you'll get.

Intwition is a little bit like Technorati for Twitter. Enter a URL and Intwition will let you know how many pages have been linked to by Twitter users, who your most active Tweeters are, and how many times they've tweeted your messages.

There are plenty of services that let you know when your web site has been mentioned by another blog, but the is the first service we've seen that lets you track the Twitter actvity related to your blog. Intwition provides a good way for bloggers to figure out who some of their biggets fans are, and make sure to follow their feeds to help build a sense of community.

Of course, you can also use Intwition to try to gauge the popularity of other web sites in the Twitopshere. Want to see how often a competitor's site is mentioned when compared to your own? You don't need to own a URL to enter it, so nothing's stopping you.

[via Rotor Blog]

The New York Times has launched a redesigned technology news page. The old school paper has partnered with some new school content partners, adding stories from third party sources like IDG and PaidContent. But probably the most interesting feature is that little column we highlighted in red. It's called "Technology Headlines From Around the Web," and it's being labeled a Techmeme killer. (Remember when people used to talk about Technorati killers? Ahh, those were the days).

That new columns is powered by BlogRunner, a news aggregator that the Times snatched up last year. The service does a pretty decent job of figuring out what stories people are talking about, posting those headlines and a list of blogs and websites linking to those stories. The New York Times/BlogRunner are hardly the only game in town when it comes to news/blog aggregation.

But here's why the paper might have a leg up on Technorati, Techmeme, or any other site that starts with the word "tech." A huge number of people already read the New York Times every day. You can't really say the same about Techmeme. It's a great place to find interesting stories, but as far as we can tell, it's primary audience is bloggers looking for good story ideas.

On the other hand, if you take a look at the screenshot above, you'll see that there's at least one major difference between the stories you find using BlogRunner and Techmeme. BlogRunner includes news from a lot of professional news outlets, including the Wall Street Journal, Reuters, and Time Magazine. In fact, there seem to be more old media types getting links than new media websites and blogs.

[via TechCrunch]

Technology news aggregator Techmeme has launched a new feature today, the Techmeme Leaderboard.

Up until now Technorati has maintained one of the most useful blog ranking services around. By no means is Technorati's Top 100 an exhaustive list of popular blogs. But by measuring web site "authority" and the number of links other bloggers make to a site, Technorati's list has long been looked to as a way of determining which blogs are most influential (which is not the same thing as determining which blogs get the highest traffic).

Techmeme uses a proprietary algorithm to determine the day's hottest news in the blogosphere. Unlike Technorati, some of the day's top stories on Techmeme will often come from mainstream news sources like the New York Times. But if you want to know what bloggers are talking about, Techmeme's front page is about as reliable a resource as any.

The Techmeme Leaderboard is a list that shows the top 100 based on stories that made the Techmeme front page in the last 30 days. In other words, if you break news, or write about news that someone else broke often enough, you have a good shot of making it onto this list. Will this list be more accurate than Technorati's? It's hard to say. But if you're looking for a hundred good blogs to add to your RSS reader, we're pretty sure most of the sites on the Techmeme Leaderboard are worth reading.

Did you know that Google has indexed 18,800 pages for Download Squad? To be honest, neither did we. But that's the sort of information you can get from Xinu, a new web stats tracker.

Just type a URL into Xinu and sit back while it compiles data from all the usual suspects plus a few unusual ones. You'll get the site's Technorati, Alexa, and Google details. but Xinu also grabs data from Yahoo!, Windows Live Search, Lycos, Digg, Bloglines, Clipmarks, and a bunch of other services.

But Xinu doesn't stop there. It also gives you several rather useless statistics like the number of words and characters in a web site's name. Maybe they just wanted to have enough data to fill a whole page.

Update: As has been pointed out in the comments, it looks like the site has been suspended. We'll keep you posted if we hear that Xinu resurfaces.

[via TechCrunch]

Get badged, by going to badged.net, where you can simply build a custom badge widget for your site or blog. The list of available badges you can include in your custom widget is pretty good:

• Digg This Story
  
• Sphere It
  
• Add to Technorati Favorites
  
• View Blog Reactions (via Technorati)
  
• Add to del.icio.us
  
• Add to Furl
  
• Add to Netscape
  
• Add to Yahoo! Myweb
  
• Add to Google Bookmarks
  
• Add to Newsvine
  
• Add to Blinklist
  
• Add to Reddit
  
• Add to Blogmarks
  
• Add to Magnolia
  
• Add to Windows Live
  
• Add to Tailrank
  
• Add to Favorites (Internet Explorer)
  
• Email This

You type in your site URL and name, check the boxes, and get the code at the bottom of the page. It could not be any easier to do and you can insert the whole thing at the bottom of your posts, your site, whatever. Sweet, slick, and fan-tas-tic. Here is what the actual badge I created looks like:
[Via The Global Geek Podcast]

Text Link Ads is providing an interesting utility that will allow you to index your blog's importance in some specific categories versus other blogs in the same space, called the Blog Juice Calculator. You can also compare your site's relative importance to the top performers. For example, Download Squad gets a very respectable 8.4 in the Computers / Technology category, which puts us about tied with Robert Scoble's blog, and slightly trailing the likes of TechCrunch, LifeHacker, and of course Engadget.

Google Juice is currently calculated based on information from Technorati, Alexa, Bloglines and Links - it's not clear where the Links metric comes from. Of course, knowing that Alexa numbers can be very skewed considering that they're based on statistics gathered by an Internet Explorer toolbar, it's probably not reasonable to consider the Blog Juice Calculator to be the final word in terms of ranking blogs. In fact, Technorati is probably the most widely accepted authority in that regard. But it's fun to play with, and you get this cool little badge for your site, if you happen to get a ranking that you're not too embarrassed to publicize.

Niall Kennedy, the self-described "feed syndication geek" who left Technorati in April to become a product manager in Microsoft's Windows Live division, this week announced that he's leaving Microsoft to start his own company. Kennedy describes the reason for his leaving Microsoft in a blog post, saying, "Windows Live is under some heavy change, reorganization, pullback, and general paralysis and unfortunately my ability to perform, hire, and execute was completely frozen as well." Concerning his start-up ambitions he says, "I want to change the way the world thinks about personal data, publishing, and search and I might have the right opportunity to do just that." Valleywag has a short "exit interview" with Kennedy here.

Ahh, Technorati, what would we do without you. You are the reason we obsessively tag all our posts, and you dutifully respond to our pings in mere minutes (under 5 according to Technorati Principal Engineer Kevin Marks) to crawl our data. On today, your third birthday, you provide us with even more excitement, in the form of a spiffy re-design and some interesting new features. The new design is more modular than in its previous state, complete with standard issue Web 2.0 graded header bars decked out in desaturated colors.

Front and center (well, top right anyway) is the new "Discover" feature. Discover allows users to view the most active posts within set categories including life, entertainment, tech and business. Users can also Discover by specifying tags or groups of tags. Keep in mind that the Discover feature is still under construction, and thus features may come and go before they reach a stable plateau. The new Discover functionality is similar to the popular site Techmeme.

Other differences from previous versions of the site include changes to the way favorites are displayed. Favorites now give more weight to a users favorites as opposed to simply which posts are most popular in the blogosphere.

Carson Workshops is running a two day conference on the development of technology you will be using tomorrow in San Francisco at the Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, on September 13-14. This isn't a no name conference either! There will be some big-hitters speaking at the event, including:

• Kevin Rose from digg
• Mike Arrington from TechCrunch
• Mike Davidson from Newsvine
• Jeff Veen from Google
• Tantek Celik from Technorati
• Cal Henderson from Flickr
• Matt Mullenweg from Wordpress
• Evan Williams from Odeo
• Tom Coates from Yahoo!
• Ted Rheingold from Dogster
• Carl Sjogreen from Google Calendar
• Steve Olechowski from Feedburner
• Ryan Carson from DropSend and Amigo

The speakers will be spilling the beans on how their successful applications were built, with a ton of practical advice on how to create your very own masterpieces or the future of web 2.0 technologies. If you are hanging out in the San Fran area, or feel like taking a trip, September 13 - 14 is the time to go for sure.

Over at the Technorati Weblog, Tantek Çelik has announced two new products, Microformats Search and Pingerati. In case you're not familiar, microformats are small bits of XML that can be used to describe things like events, product reviews, or contacts in a way that's easily readible by both humans and machines. Technorati's microformats search, which is currently in the "technology preview" (i.e. beta) stage, lets you search for microformat-tagged information posted to any of the millions of blogs Technorati indexes. Pingerati is a new site that you can "ping" to get your microformats indexed by Technorati's microformats search, as well as a service for developers that can send microformats to other sites. For example, if you ran a calendar site, Pingerati could forward all of the microformatted events that it receives to your site, kind of like a Ping-o-Matic for microformats.

Yesterday blog search portal Technorati gained what founder Dave Sifry describes in his blog as "a whole raft of improvements and tweaks." Among them are charts which show blog mentions of your search terms over time, "Scoped Search" which narrows your search results into categories, enhanced profiles, and more. Technorati has made a lot of improvements in recent months in an attempt to remain relevance in an ever more crowded field, and those efforts appear to be paying off.