Important Bookmarklet Tips for All Bloggers : Technorati PopDex Waypath

Important Bookmarklet Tips for All Bloggers : Technorati PopDex Waypath

TECHNORATI

Technorati is a page which can be added to your Internet Explorer by dragging the red javascript link "Technorati Anywhere!" on the Technorati pages to your menu links toolbar on the IE browser (then rename the long text to something like Tchnrti to take up less space on the toolbar). Anytime you are on ANY blog page you can click on this Technorati button and it will instantly take you to Technorati, which will tell you how many inbound blogs and how many inbound links point to that blog page. For example, when at the LawPundit blog page one clicks on the Technorati link button, is taken to Technorati, which opens a page showing that LawPundit has 50 Inbound Blogs and 54 Inbound Links (as of November 3, 2003), listing these links in numerical order.

You can of course also go to Technorati at any time, plug the name of ANY desired blog URL in the search box on this page at Technorati and then click "Get Link Cosmos" to find out who is linking to that blog.

POPDEX

To find out WHO has linked to your blog and WHEN they did it, use PopDex:

Go the PopDex addlink page side-bar-listed as Add Popdex Search/Link, then scroll down a bit to "Popdex Citations Bookmarklet"
and drag the link "Get Popdex Citations" to your Links Toolbar in Internet Explorer.
After that, rename the text on the button to something like Ppdx so it does not take up as much space.

Once you have this bookmarklet on your menu tool bar, any time you are on ANY blog page, including your own blog - and that is of course the most important aspect - you can click on this bookmarklet and it will take you to PopDex telling you which sites have linked to your blog and when they did so. As PopDex writes: "This bookmarklet can be used to get the Popdex citations for whatever page that you are viewing at the time."

WAYPATH - essentially a DOCUMENT RELATIONSHIP SEARCH

Waypath can be dragged to your menu links toobar so you have it available for instant access. Waypath allows you to search blogs for particular subject postings by entering either Keywords or a URL in the search box.
Note that the clickable scroll on the drop-down box offers BOTH of these options.

Waypath describes its method of working as follows:
"Waypath's Related Weblog Navigation engine analyzes weblog entries to determine their core conceptual makeups, compares them with one another to find out how related they are, and presents you with its best guess as to what's related to your original input. This is done all automatically, using available technology."

First enter your weblog URL, then click Waypath It! and Waypath looks for weblog entries which touch upon subjects related to those to which you have posted on your blog.
You must enter a VALID URL or you will get a text-based ERROR page.

If you search by "Keyword" topic rather than URL, you have to scroll the search box drop-down list to "Keywords". Now enter e.g. "patent law" and you get ca. 3000 entries. Too many. Enter e.g. "patent law Eolas" and it becomes a manageable ca. 150 hits.
Note that these hits are distinctively different than what search engines such as Google or AllTheWeb produce with the same search words.

The only problem I have found with Waypath is that it is agonizingly slow - perhaps it is used by too many people and the servers are unable to handle the load?