Blogging is one of the most significant sectors of user created content on the web today. Starting a blog is as easy as opening a Hotmail account, and most web users have access to at least one blogging outlet - be it through a social networking profile, a blogging forum, or perhaps even a personal blog page. What is significant is the rate at which the volume of this content is increasing - far more quickly than people are uploading videos to Youtube, or indeed any other form of user published content. The numbers sum up the situation pretty clearly: 175,000 new blogs launched every day, 1.6 million total blog posts daily (equating to 18 updates per second), and over 200 million total blogs - not counting MySpace and other social networking profile blogs. Question is: how to find and keep up to date with quality and relevant content, without spending every waking minute drowning in the endless sea of constant posts? Well, luckily for us Technorati has a solution…
Technorati.com is a pretty simple blog tracking website which follows over 100m blogs, and 250m pieces of tagged social media each day. The website offers different categories, such as entertainment, business, technology, and then within each sub-section lists what is currently popular and provides links. The big idea however, which separates Technorati from its competitors, is the use of social networking principles in tracking inter-blog relationships to work out what is most popular and relevant (hence influential). The site uses a system of ‘Authority’ points, which are awarded to articles depending not only on how many readers they have, but also how many comments they attract, how often they are linked in other blogs etc. This set of criteria is used to assess the impact of a post, assign it to its relevant categories depending on content, tags and location, and then to insert it into the different ranking lists.
I had a little explore of Technorati’s results and rankings to see how it all functioned in practice. A quick look at their most influential blogs looks pretty accurate - no surprise to find Engadget and TechCrunch occupying the top two positions, with Technorati being totally up to date with the latest posts from both sites - even ones uploaded less than half an hour ago. So far so good. The Authority points allocated to each site can be broken down and assessed in terms of which stories are most important and currently influential, and all the interfaces are functional and effective. However, if I change my approach slightly and search for ‘Dejan Levi’ or ‘EtonDigital’ to see how well Technorati is tracking smaller individual blogs such as this one (which in theory it is doing), then the system begins to reveal its weaknesses. The search results list a number of articles, but the most recent is from 20 days ago - and there have been a number of newer posts since then. The site offers a way to get around this problem by offering a ‘Ping Us’ button, where bloggers can submit links for their content updates in order to ensure Technorati is up to date, but I feel this is somehow a poor solution. Basically in order for smaller blogs to be well represented, it is required that bloggers are telling Technorati about every update they make - which is time consuming, and also requires that everyone knows about Technorati in the first place, in order to send in updated URLs.
In summary, Technorati is trying to provide a much needed service for the modern web - a content navigator for written content, and a tracker of the success and popularity of different sites and blogs. Unfortunately their strength at the moment is basically telling us what we already know, like a highly qualified fast-food industry expert telling us that McDonalds and Burger King are big players (it is unlikely for example that there are many users who do know of Technorati, but not that Engadget or TechCrunch are significant, influential blogs). The principles which Technorati is employing look like they can yield excellent results, and I don’t doubt that the site will only go from strength to strength. The only problem at the moment seems that, even despite an effective approach, and a few years experience in the field, Technorati (like everyone else) is still having some problems with the sheer volume of content out there. Consequently the diversity of its results suffers, and it will take some time before it can properly track and represent the millions of smaller blogs out there as well as it already does for the industry leaders.
Dejan Levi