The Washington Post is the latest site to integrate blog commentary (provided by Technorati) into their news coverage. Well done, Technorati and WaPo.

Just when I say I’m down on Technorati, they set up an interesting deal with Newsweek to integrate blog coverage into their web site. Technorati CEO David Sifry gives a good rundown of the features on his blog. It’s essentially the sports buzz features I’ve been running here but they’re integrating it into stories and giving it a section on the web site.

You can see the Newsweek Blog Roundup today.

Update: It’s “gratifying” to see they only have around a hundred link in when you get to stories further down the list. Blogging about politics is HUGE compared to blogging about sports. It’s amazing to me that this is the case, but it’s most definitely true. I’ve always been surprised at the small number of good sports bloggers out there, which makes it tougher to sell blogs to folks at work. Politics has the right intersection of writers and passionate fans, I guess.

Jason Kottke is complaining about Technorati on his blog. I think, at the end of the day, he’s absolutely right. I had hoped at some point to be able to use Technorati’s data and technology for this research project I have going on at ESPN.com, but quite frankly the data has been so inconsistent that I’ve been forced to start looking around.

I’ve been doing a comparison of PubSub and Technorati and just want to second Kottke’s observations. PubSub has more results, seems a bit more timely, and is consistent. Technorati, well, when they’re working works alright, but seems pretty limited in their functionality. The main limitation of PubSub is that they don’t expose traditional search functionality: you can’t look back at what people have been saying, you can only get notified in the future about posts that match your terms. It’s great for watching your blog or for links to ESPN.com, say, but sucks when you’re trying to research blog reaction to the latest speech by Bush or blog reviews of the Mighty Mouse.

Just one other thought. The problems all started with the redesign of the site, really. It used to be hit or miss but nowhere near as bad as it is now. My Sports Buzz posts on FM suck now because clicking “Read Blogs” more often than not gets you an error message rather than actual blog entries. What good is the fancy redesign if the basic functionality is broken?

Especially since it seems like a parlor trick when it actually does work. I think they cache the results to successful queries which means that if it’s a common search or a common tag, you’ll get results. Do anything the least bit unusual and you’ll get an error page. So, it’s unclear how timely the results actually are… I do notice that the tag queries seem more reliable than regular search terms, but I suspect that it’s easier to index and catalog them (the users have already done the hard work of choosing which words to associate the post with…

Update: Have to second Kottke’s note about IceRocket. I’ve been playing around with them for the past hour or so and they’re pretty solid. On the surface, they’re competing with Technorati on what I see as key features (allowing users to directly ping them rather than relying on the blo.gs cloud) and with link counts (what Technorati calls authority), and some other details. The implementation of “linking blogs” looks especially interesting and I’ll be implementing this on FM soon, I think.

Another little tweak for those of you reading but mostly for those of you that post here… I’ve installed a plugin that adds support for Technorati Tags to FatMixx. Those of you that write here will see an extra box on the post page. The field is optional, but allows you to put in what are essentially keywords. This allows you to expand on the standard set of categories.

Please try to use em… I’m curious to see what we all choose as keywords for the various things we write… Oh, and the Categories should get picked up automatically, so there’s no reason to add them to the tag box.