Technorati offers great ways to keep on top of what people are writing about in Blogland with their Newstalk, Booktalk and Current Events services. David Sifry presented Technorati at the Future Salon two months ago. I guess that's why I got a personal invitation to the first Technorati Developers Salon. (I wonder where he got that slick name from 🙂 ? Actually I found out only later, that there is a Berkeley Cybersalon happening for many years already. Would I have known that from the beginning, I probably would have called my futurists gathering something else.)
Here are some of my thoughts to the Technorati offerings from an SAP Developer Network perspective:
My first interest was of course, what are people writing about SAP? Technorati comes back with an error message: "term to short", when I just search for "SAP". Only when you input the whole URLhttp://www.sap.com one gets 4 pages of results. I discovered some, that are writing about NetWeaver, excellent, although I think that there should be more than 4 pages, after all SAP is the third largest independent software company.
My second search was about SDN: http://sdn.sap.com. According to Technorati there are only 10 links that point to SDN. In part that is our own doing, we could be more open. We are working on changing that, but as we experience right now once you have gone in the direction of requesting sign-in it is not that easy to turn the tide.
It is probably also the reason, why our few external links, don't show on the Technorati radar. Example Stefan Klensch links in his What is Web Dynpro? An Attempt at an Answer. blog to Struts(CX), but that does not register in the Technorati search results for http://jakarta.apache.org/struts/.
I think the Technorati API could come really handy as addition to the mySAP CRM solution: The sales person checks before going out to a customer not only it's open orders or invoices, but also what bloggers have written lately about that company. That information could be easily integrated using the API.
Tomorrow evening I am going to be at Technorati Developers Salon and we may discuss some of the things mentioned above. Please let me know what else would make Technorati more useful to you and I will be your ambassador.
