On its third anniversary, the weblog aggregator Technorati released upgrades today to many areas of its site. The upgrades include faster indexing of posts, more up-to-date link counts and authority metrics, less intrusive ads and better sorting options. The company also introduced a new "Discover" tab to make finding interesting blogs more intuitive. The Popular section was also revamped to place important information on one page including its Top 100 Blogs, and the Most Favorited. Lastly, enhancements were also made to its Blog Directory. Details about the enhancements are available at Technorati's site.

The current issue of Affiliate Classroom covers article marketing best practices including the most important criteria when creating an article, how to target your article, how long to make the article, and the best ways to distribute. Other articles discuss tips for non-writers and how to customize private label articles. This issue also includes a discussion of tag and ping with Technorati. Read the July 2006 issue here.

The press release distribution company PRWeb has integrated support for SHIFT Communications' social media press release template and introduced a Technorati tagging widget into its submission form. The new user interface enhancements also include a tag suggestion utility to "facilitate the automatic generation of effective tags that match press release content and keyword density", according to the company.

Jack held a conference call with Sean Wu, the author of an upcoming book on Tag & Ping. He now has the call recording available for download.