Technorati have added a new “topics” feature to their front page and menus.
It updates live, in a similar way to Truemors.com and various widgets such as the one for Netscape.com
Topics are split between Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life and apparently blogs have been selected based upon Technorati Authority, frequency of posting, use of relevant tags, links to related subject matter and general topicality.
In theory some of my content might appear within both the Technology and Business sections, but that remains to be seen.
Is Technorati Topics Useful?
In theory it is spam free but it is also elitist, though the bar hasn’t been set insanely high for entry. I suppose it might bring additional readers to sites who wouldn’t otherwise get noticed.
I have seen one blog with an authority of 65 appearing in the results already.
Technorati Bugs Fixed?
The Technorati Popular page is fairly broken
Apparently Guy Kawasaki has a twin, in fact he is not the only one…
I actually took these screen shots a week ago, and nothing has really changed
Automattic is now a top rated blog… huh?
Lets have a look at the quality of the posts in the feed on the Automattic blog
There are other discrepancies too, but it is really not my place to snitch on anyone. Technorati are allowed to interpret and hand edit the results just as much or maybe more than Google are, especially as they don’t have a monopoly and 10,000+ employees.
The errors I have pointed out here are the most obvious ones.
I did check to see if they have fixed the Technorati favorites for those with more than 200 – they haven’t so I can’t add or remove any.
Important Milestone For Technorati
Recently Technorati have had quite a few shake ups, with Dave Sifry dropping his CEO role (but remaining Chairman) and 8 people were also let go.
Prior to that in July Adam Hertz, Tantek Celik and Liz Dunn left whilst hiring promoting Dorion Carroll.
Corrected – see comment by Dorion in comments
By my reckoning, Technorati probably still have around 40 staff and have still to show how they are going to integrate Personal Bee which they previously acquired.
Hopefully we will start to see either existing systems fixed, or more ways we can interact and explore our favorite blogs, and make use of what is still one of the best implementations of OPML.
8 Comments
I get the feeling that Technorati’s rankings aren’t updating at all. Mine hasn’t changed in 4-5 days which is quite unusual.
It is possible you are not gaining enough links compared to 6 months ago – you were gaining some large spikes in traffic then from Digg
Andy – that’s true, I’m probably not accumulating links as quickly as before, although having sponsored a prize for David Airey’s blog contest I do see a lot of links coming in.
But I don’t see my ranking going up OR down. Lately it’s been dropping, a testament to the link building I was doing 6+ months ago, and now it seems stuck.
Andy, thanks for the feedback on Topics and for pointing out some of the issues with Popular. I’ll be looking into it today. We are working hard to get updates working 100% of the time but problems do arise. Thanks for pointing them out. Ben, I’ll see what I can do for your blog.
BTW, I’ve been with Technorati for 3 of its 4 years. Dorion
Hi Dorion
First let me apologise, I was skim reading David Sifry’s post and read as far as “This moment also affords me the opportunity to extend a welcome – to our friend and colleague Dorion Carroll, who will take on the role of Vice President of Engineering, reporting to me.”
I didn’t read any more of the paragraph…
Glad to see things being implemented and fixed. I really like the OPML features though editing 900 favorites to remove a few broken ones was hard before the interface disappeared. There was talk of a more ajaxified editing interface with less page loads.
I don’t know how much I like the feature itself, but when I took my day off reading blogs, I actually found out about it through a tiny traffic spike from Technorati. Maybe it’s elitist, but it somehow works in my favor even though my blog isn’t that popular, lol.
The speed at which is scrolls is a bit disconcerting. But the fact that I see lesser known blogs is comforting. On the other hand, why does stuff from 10 am that morning get mixed in with things that were just published. I find that weird.
I just want Technorati to fix the problems with the Favorites! I can add people to my favorites, but then a page pops up saying “oops, we can’t show you your favorites because you have too many”, or something like that. So I don’t even know if the people I’m favoriting are actually getting added to my favorites! Drives me NUTS.
ha. “making it easy.” That’s halarious.