DigitalBeat

Technorati Media is launching Twittorati, a new site that blends the blogosphere with the Twittersphere. The site shows you the Twitter feeds of the top 100 tech bloggers, who are among the most prolific Twitter users.

Technorati measures the top 100 tech bloggers in terms of their “authority,” which is a blend of both how popular their sites are and how often someone links to them (VentureBeat, why thank you, ranks No. 24 on this list). But the combination of the two sites can make readers feel like they’re really catching up with what’s important at any given time. That’s the idea, at least.

You can use Twittorati to catch a lot of information at once, in near real time. At a glance, you can see the most popular links — that is, the ones that the top bloggers are citing the most in their posts. You can also see their Tweets, or 140-character Twitter updates. You can see the most popular photos used in the blog posts and look at who’s ranked among the top 100 blogs. And you can see the “hash tags,” or the most popular Twitter search terms at a given moment.

Richard Jalichandra, chief executive of Technorati, said in an interview that Twittorati is the company’s response to requests people have been making for the past 15 months, particularly as blogs and Tweets converge.

“Micro-blogging sites like Twitter have become an extension of the blogosphere, or really a part of it,” Jalichandra said.

Readers can look up the Tweets and posts of individual writers. Some of the top blogs have lots of writers. In that case, the Twittorati site tracks the corporate and individual Twitter accounts for everyone writing for the blog. Over time, Jalichandra says the company will expand Twittorati to cover thousands of the bloggers with the highest authority ratings.

“This is a way for people to find higher quality content,” Jalichandra said. “When these people link to something, it carries more weight.”

San Francisco-based Technorati teamed up with Sawhorse Media, which has a platform for aggregating Tweet data, while Technorati has all of the necessary blogging data. (Sawhorse is publisher of Muckrack.com and VentureMaven.com.) Technorati’s main site keeps track of pretty much everybody in the blogosphere. According to media measurement firm comScore, Technorati is now the sixth largest social media company, with a grand total of 118 million unique visitors a month across all of its properties. Infiniti, the luxury car maker, is the exclusive sponsor of Twittorati.

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