Becoming a geek

s part of my research into Web 2.0, I've been fiddling with Technorati and Feedburner. It's all worryingly geekish. The result has been some minor changes to the column on the right over the past week or so.

By 'claiming' my blog with Technorati, updates on my blog are now automatically included in Technorati blog searches. I can also tell how many blogs link to mine (just one, apparently - Tony's. I don't know why it doesn't include Penny's blog or yclepta.)

Registering with Feedburner and adding the orange icon to the column on the right means that people can add the RSS feed to their aggregators so that they are notified whenever I update the blog. I can keep track of how many people subscribe (i.e. link) to that feed. It's currently one: me, for testing purposes.

According to Steve Rubel, everyone should adopt a common feed symbol so that the coming wave of RSS users will recognise it. So far, however, Feedburner doesn't offer that symbol as an option.

Update: The icon is now available for download. I'll be adding it to my site shortly. If you don't like the orange colour, you can customise it.