Some time ago, Gina Chen wrote a wonderful blog post on “Save the Media” on Technorati and its uses for journalist bloggers.

I mentioned Technorati about a week later ago in my post, “Get to know your bloggers,” as part of the basic research every reporter, editor and producer — hell, every blogger — should do when starting a blog.

Let’s walk you through what you’re actually going to do on Technorati:

1. First, you’re going to want to join the site, of course. Create an easy username/login, because you’ll be able to “claim” as many blogs as you want, which is good if your newspaper or broadcast station has multiple blogs.

2. Once you’ve done that and received your login, you’ll click “Blogger Central” near the top of the screen and scroll down to “Claim Your Blog.” You shouldn’t see any blogs, since you haven’t claimed any yet, but this is what I see, because I’ve already claimed two blogs:

3. When prompted, type in your blog’s home page URL to claim it.

4. Technorati will then give you a bit of code to link to insert in a blog post for publication. After you “ping” Technorati, in turn, will then spider your page after you “ping” it.

Pinging Technorati is simple. In your first post, just code in something like:

<em>If you like my blog, you can also check out my Technorati page <a href=”CODE”>here</a>.</em>

5. Now you should ping the Technorati page. You can also set your blog up to automatically ping Technorati when you post a story. You blog will soon show up on your “Claimed Blogs” page.
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Once you’re on, here are a few things to remember:

- Your blog authority is determined by the number of inbound links you’ve received over the last six months.

- Technorati is a great way to find blogs similar to yours. If you see one that has a high authority rank, you probably want to start commenting on it to get noticed.

- One interesting trick is to set up all of the blogs in your blogroll — and tags you care about — in a Technorati Watchlist. In a blog post on “Micro Persuasion,” Steve Rubel suggests this is a good way to keep track of what’s going on in your part blogosphere. (NOTE: I haven’t tried this before, but it seems to make sense.)

If I haven’t convinced you, maybe these folks can:

- Darren Rowse, Problogger.net – ‘Help me, my mom is my blog’s only reader’

- Allen Stern, Center Networks – ‘How I use Technorati’