Technorati launched in 2002 and became a critical tool in the years that followed as blog relations became an important skill for the PR industry. It was the easiest way to find out when bloggers picked up on a pitch or covered a trend, and who was linking to those posts. Today, posts from top blogs are picked up by Google News, Google Blog Search, IceRocket, and even the staid Lexis-Nexis.

Technorati is attempting raise its relevance again with the launch of Twittorati, a tool to show Twitter activity from bloggers in the Technorati 100. It's powered in partnership with Sawhorse Media, makers of Muck Rack, an aggregator of journalists on Twitter.

Despite accusations of TMI from TechCrunch, it holds promise for PR in that it's built on the premise that blogging and Twitter are now symbiotic. It tracks which links are being shared the most, which hashtags are trending, as well as which Technorati tags are trending. It also has functionality to track the Tweets of all the writers at a given blog, not just one.

While you're considering the debate spurred by the big New York Times feature on Brooke Hammerling this past weekend on whether or not encouraging a few good Tweets is in fact PR, you might want to take Twittorati for a spin.

What's slightly ironic is the treatment of the Top 100 as the only gatekeepers of information, which feels like the circulation charts of yesteryear. Technorati does plan to increase the number--we hope it grows to a hundred times that many.

Related: Filter the MSM's Tweets By Beat with Muck Rack