Today, Technorati introduced a new feature called Technorati Tags that is really cool. Basically, it combines the power of blogs, pictures, and links contributed by people all over the world, and displays them all on the same page, according to whatever 'tag' they've been assigned.

As of today, Technorati has no posts yet that match the tag:radiouserland. I see an opportunity to fill a void here by adding the posts on my site, Radio UserLand: The Missing Manual, to this page.

To accomplish this, I'm going to have to start tagging my blog posts.

Technorati says..

To contribute to this tag, just make a post to your blog about radiouserland and include a link to this page like so:

I'd rather not type the link every time I post a new item to my site. Rather, I'm going to modify the #itemTemplate.txt file, located in the Radio UserLand:www folder.

I pasted the link provided by Technorati into the text file, saved and closed the file. From now on, when I publish a post, it will have that link embedded in it. That's step one. Step two involves pinging Technorati.

Pinging is the process by which your Radio weblog tells a server that you've published a post. Radio UserLand can automatically ping Weblogs.com when you publish your weblog but how do you instruct Radio to ping Technorati?

Master Ping

Technorati says..

If your blog software is configured to automatically ping us, there's nothing more you need to do – your post should appear here automatically.

Patrick Ritchie, Radio programmer extraordinaire, created a Radio tool that not only pings Technorati, it pings several other services as well.

Download and place the tool in your Radio Tools folder, then restart Radio. Visit the Master Ping control panel to select the desired services to be pinged. The Tool comes with blo.gs, blo.gs extended, Syndic8, Syndic8 extended, Yahoo and Technorati.

That takes care of letting Technorati know about my posts. Now, I'll fire off a test post to be sure it's working.

Now that's more like it! There are links to my posts and since I regularly add links to Del.icio.us with a tag of 'radiouserland', all those links also show up on the page. If I took the time to upload Radio UserLand screen grabs to flickr, those would show up as well.

At this point, you may be asking yourself, "Do I really want all my posts tagged with one particular tag?" Well, in my case, Yes. For those of you who want to selectively tag your posts, Matt from Oddio has created a bookmarklet for adding Technorati Tags. I haven't tried it with Radio yet but I see no reason why it shouldn't work.

Happy tagging!