Technorati Your Poetry Fix

I just found the absolute coolest tool on Technorati. It”s called Technorati Mini, and it”s a mini search window that is updated every minute or so with the search of your choice. Now, understand, if there”s one thing that I love almost as much as I adore poetry, it”s little techie toys. Not hardware toys, though those are nice enough, but the soft stuff – new search engines, nifty code that makes things look pretty and stuff like the Technorati Mini. In fact, one of the reasons that I love WordPress is that the developers understand that – their tagline is Code Is Poetry. And it is.

But I have in mind at more poetic use for the Technorati Mini. If you”re not familiar with Technorati, here”s what it does in a nutshell (from their own website):

So what this has to do with poetry. Blogs are rapidly becoming a medium by which poets disseminate their work – in text entries, in audio files, in podcasts and in vlogs. Technorati tracks blogs about everything. They estimate that there are about 75,000 new blogs a day, and about 1.2 million updates to blogs daily. A lot of these blogs are about poetry, written by poets, post poetry, post about poets – you get the idea.

I love reading new poetry. I love seeing what people out there are writing about. Technorati Mini launches a little window that hides under my other stuff, and searches the blogosphere every 60 seconds for anything new about poetry. If it finds something, voila! It appears in my little window and I can check it out. In the last ten minutes, I”ve found:

100 Billion Reasons, a blog about technology, poetry, languages, politics and more, with a couple of easy on the ear and eye poems and some links to sites of Finnish poetry – as well as a gorgeous picture of a Tallinn sunset.

I followed a link from Marsha”s blog to her book of poetry at Rash”s House, where I spent a delightful half hour reading in her family album.

And an announcement of an upcoming event in NYC that I won”t attend, but that sounds interesting – and mentioned a few names that I”ll probably follow up on just to read their poetry.

There”s something new about every ten minutes or so – sometimes several new posts somewhere out there that mention poetry specifically. If you”re bored some evening or afternoon and want to find something a little random, a little unusual, a little funky and tangentially poetic, I highly recommend doing an hour or so on the Technorati Mini. Just click on it, type “poetry” into the search bar, and see where it takes you.