Should Technorati Index Bulletin Boards and How

Posted Fri, 08/12/2005 - 22:42 by John Breslin

It popped into my head a few days ago that Technorati could do something very similar to their blog search engine for bulletin boards. How?

  1. Bulletin boards can provide RSS feeds of their content, on a per-forum basis. I've installed this functionality for phpBB and vBulletin, and there's not that much to it.
  2. Bulletin board software usually has BBCode, or quick markup for inserting HTML into a discussion post. You then just have to add a BBCode markup item for "tags".

For example,

[tag]{param}[/tag]

would get translated to:

Tag: <a target=_blank href="http://www.technorati.com/tags/{param}">{param}</a>

for use by Technorati (as long as the HTML is exported in the description / content chunk).

Once one set of bulletin board developers start implementing this and seeing the search benefits, you can bet the rest would cop on pretty quickly.

Of course, SIOC can also be used to express information about a bulletin board post more completely than RSS, and this tag information could form part of that.

Comments

[...] Klostu was recently

by Klostu - a social network for bulletin board sites at Cloudl (not verified) - 11/14/2006 - 18:17

[...] Klostu was recently demonstrated at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco where it generated a lot of buzz, and not surprisingly as there are very few companies operating in this space, despite the potential benefits that connecting bulletin boards offer (see my previous post on a “Technorati for bulletin boards“). [...]

Yes, someone should make

by NickD (not verified) - 09/15/2005 - 22:31

Yes, someone should make this. If found this post by Googeling "Technorati for Message Boards" (not in quotes).