Even though I've been weblogging since March 2000, I have not worked systematically to cultivate a readership for my blogs. But now that I've left the comforts of my university staff position, I've become much more interested in developing an audience for my websites. Of course, one of the basic ways to develop a readership is to be a good reader of other people's work. We are involved in conversations on the web, after all.

One little technique to use to keep my blogs in the mix is to have my blogs ping technorati whenever I write a post on my wordpress blogs. Following http://technorati.com/developers/ping/wordpress.html, I figure that I should go to WP->Options->Writing->Update services to add http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping . Update Services « WordPress Codex provides a list of ping notification services in addition to technorati, including the one for Google Blog Search -- which I've started to using in addition to technorati. I'd like to figure out which of the blog search engines are the best ones to use.