Technorati used to be the pinnacle of blog search, an essential tool for every blogger, journalist, and news junkie. The service has since fallen from grace as replacements, such as Google Blog Search, have surfaced. Now, Technorati is completely revamping its site and service for what seems like the hundredth time. This time around, it is making major changes to its famous Top 100/Technorati Authority, as well as improving its search and blog directory. Technorati will also allow bloggers to publish their content directly on Technorati.com, creating a wealth of original content.
The home page of Technorati's re-vamped site.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)One of Technorati's core features has been authority. Technorati uses authority to rank blogs into the top 100 and to give feedback about how reliable a source is. In this re-launch, authority rankings will change more quickly to accommodate for the fast-paced nature of blogs. They have also added "topical authority," which ranks blogs in categories which they cover.
Technorati also stresses that it has made significant changes to its search algorithm. In the past, Technorati's search delivered the most recent results as opposed to the best results. Now, Technorati will try to fetch you the best results, based on several factors, including authority. Its improved blog directly also now allows for better sorting by category, showing the top blogs and the biggest movers for each one.
Technorati's new Top 100.
(Credit: Screenshot by Harrison Hoffman/CNET)Finally, Technorati will begin to offer original content from bloggers who want their content to be published on the site. This is definitely a win-win situation for bloggers and for Technorati. Technorati gets a lot of good, fresh content and bloggers can hope to gain more exposure. If you're interested in this program, you can sign up here.
This is, overall, a very strong update for Technorati as it works to return to prominence. Technorati will almost certainly see a short-term jump in usage from this major revamp, but whether users will stick around remains to be seen.
Other sites that also work to aggregate the hottest stories on the Internet include Gabe Rivera's Techmeme and Tailrank. In my opinion, Technorati Topics comes up short, while Techmeme succeeds, simply because of the way that the stories are displayed. Techmeme reads more like a newspaper, with the most talked about stories of the moment on the top of the page, and its River feature, which shows the stories in chronological order. Technorati Topics lets the stories fall down the page, much like Digg Spy. The reason why this doesn't work particularly well for Technorati Topics is because so many blogs are included in its pool.
It seems as if Technorati is displaying every blog post from those in its pool, instead of the popular ones. It is really hard to tell from looking at Technorati Topics what the most important and popular stories are. While it may be entertaining to watch Technorati Topics for a few minutes to see some blog posts, the speed at which the stories fall down the page, along with the lack of filtering for individual posts, really hurts the service.
I have been a big fan of Technorati for awhile now, and it has been really painful to watch it struggle recently. Even though Technorati Topics will probably not be a smash hit it its current state, it's nice to see the site pushing out new features again and trying to get back on top. Hopefully this is just one of many things that Technorati has up its sleeves as it tries to get back on its feet.
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