Marketing Pilgrim

Technorati has seen a lot of changes this year. In May, they launched a total redesign. In August, then-CEO Dave Sifry stepped down without a replacement. In September, they launched a stream-of-consciousness-river-of-news Topics section to highlight posts in each area (for one second apiece), which soon became the new front page for Technorati. And today, as reported by TechCrunch, they have another redesign going live.

The new front page is similar to the topics front page in that it features recent stories. However, stories are featured for longer and the featured stories are determined in a Techmeme-esque algorithmic way (kind of ironic after the heat CEO Richard Jalichandra took for paying Techmeme a backhanded compliment in October).

Interestingly, Technorati is pulling stories from both blogs (in the left-most column) and mainstream media (center column) to be featured on their homepage. The topics pages are still available from the top navigation tabs, but have been redesigned like the homepage, rather than the constantly-churning old version.

TechCrunch also reports that there are some new additions to Technorati’s offerings:

The first is a resource page for bloggers called, fittingly, Blogger Central. It shows blog posts about blogging (clustered using the news aggregator engine) as well as popular blog tags at any given time. The page also has top blogs by links and popularity.

The second, pictured left, is a new product called Today In Photos. Like AOL’s new Mgnet product, it shows popular news via the photos and images included in those news items. People like to see and click on images. This page will show them what’s hot, visually. Users can reach the page by clicking on the grouping of images on the bottom of every page.

While the Blogger Central page sounds interesting (it’s a bit like Technorati Trends, really), Today In Photos probably wouldn’t be useful to me, at least (although it could be entertaining). What do you think? Are the new features enough to save Technorati’s failing fortunes?

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