I just wanted to point out that Google just released a blog search tool (in beta); presumably this will compete somewhat with Technorati. I haven't tried it yet and will be interested in people's impressions.
And on an unrelated note, in case you haven't noticed, I've been on somewhat of a blog hiatus recently. This is likely to continue for a while longer as my research projects are requiring a lot of time lately. It's nice in this respect being just a sub-blogger here: I don't have to worry that everyone will quit reading the blog just because I'm not writing anything.
My first impression is that it might be more comprehensive than technorati. Google says "The goal of Blog Search is to include every blog that publishes a site feed (either RSS or Atom", and "If your blog publishes a site feed in any format and automatically pings an updating service (such as Weblogs.com), we should be able to find and list it."
I am not quite sure how technorati gets updated. I usually have to ping it manually to have things show up there in a timely manner. I always find things in blogs that I don't see in technorati.
Google's crawlers should be able to find me without me having to wave flags, and since my blog tool (Blogger) pings weblogs for me, I don't need to do that either.
I suspect Google might be able to find more blogs this way than technorati.