spikes

Technorati provides two interesting queries for discovering who is linking to a blog and what a blog links to. This Python example illustrates how to find who the set of people linking to a blog are (in), and what other blogs they link to (out). It essentially backs one step up in the link graph, checks which other blogs are linked to, sorts the results based on the number of common references and the global link count.

This query has the nice effect of creating a dynamic group around the people that are linking to a specific blog (possibly yours). It can be used to discover who else they are interested in without doing a bunch of manual web searches. Since they are interested in you they must be smart and link to a bunch of other interesting people :)

The inspiration for this query came from using del.icio.us, rather than explicitly linking to a group of people, I want to see who is interested in what based on their current behavior. For example creating a link to my blog or a link to another website.

The example is coded in python and uses one call to the cosmos-query and then N calls to the outbound-blogs-query based on the number of people/blogs in the cosmos of the start url. A simple python method sums the number of people in your cosmos that link to common blogs, sorts the results, and formats the results in html.

Example usages:

-u [url to analyze]
-o [html file to generate]

python inandout.py -u http://cfry.net/blog/spikes -o my.html

I would love to hear feedback and more ideas about how to make use of the technorati api.

Here is some example output for my blog: here.

Pete points out that there is a similar query here