Technorati Adds Topics to Help Make You Famous
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007;
-- Jordan McCollum |
Even after a complete redesign a little while back and the loss of their CEO, there are more changes up for blog search engine Technorati. Now they’ve added “Topics,” a streaming-river-of-news section of their site divided into topics: all, entertainment, technology, politics, sports, business and life.
Technorati’s blog announcement of the feature states that:
Each topic features blog posts from many of the best blogs out there to help you discover what’s going on. The posts are refreshed frequently to reflect breaking news, new opinions, and the latest from the Web. We’ve set out to help you find some great blog posts to read and we’ve organized them by easy to browse topics. We considered a number of factors to get the seed list of blogs including Technorati Authority, frequency of posting, use of relevant tags, links to related subject matter and general topicality.
Technorati also says the idea came from users’ urging them to:
organize the vastness of the blogosphere and help people find the good stuff and help great bloggers be found.
That may be the case—if you happen to come to the page within 10 seconds of a great blogger’s post. As Read/WriteWeb puts it:
Unfortunately, Technorati’s scroll of news moves so fast it defies usefulness. In the space of a couple of minutes 30 or so stories might fly by — hovering your mouse over a story stops the scroll, but that doesn’t do much to alleviate the information overload. Further, once a post drops off the scroll (which doesn’t take long) it appears to be gone for good.
Personally, I’ll just keep posting every 10 seconds.
Another major shortcoming with this setup is that the categorization is far from perfect. Watching the Life stream for a few seconds, I saw several posts or entire blogs that probably would be better under Technology (video games, CSS, LEDs), entertainment (Mary-Kate Olson, fashion week), and splogs (oh, wait, that’s not a category).
Finally, while Technorati authority is obviously a far-from-perfect gauge of a blog’s “greatness,” and only one measure they use in evaluating the blogs for inclusion, it certainly doesn’t take much to get into this news stream:
Just for comparison purposes, Marketing Pilgrim’s authority is over 2000 (although we are obviously, or rather, hopefully not in the Life category)—and we’re not even (quite) in the top 500 most popular blogs.
So quick, publish something and see if you get in! Then just sit back and wait for the floods of traffic that Technorati claims your ten seconds of fame will bring.
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September 11th, 2007 at 9:53 pm
This article just wizzed by me on Technorati’s topic feed. So I clicked. How self referential, indeed.
September 12th, 2007 at 12:30 am
Yep. It’s a on the underwhelming side. I’ll give them credit for trying to organize things into topics, but there isn’t much reason to sit there and wait to see what gets published next.
Maybe if instead of a handful of categories they organized things by all the tags people use and displayed a tag cloud under each category where you could drill down a little further it might slow down the scroll enough to make it more useful.
September 12th, 2007 at 10:27 am
Will se how this can help to promote.
September 12th, 2007 at 4:41 pm
This is a VERY helpful post. I am new to the blogosphere and appreciate your comments/suggestions about improving my “authority” as a blogger.
Ted
September 13th, 2007 at 9:13 pm
I agree, This is a VERY helpful post.