Metafluence

Is Technorati dead?

Recently my friend Marshall wrote a post The best things about Technorati trying to point out the last remaining points of value it still has. Marshall is an extremely smart guy and he did point out some great features:

• The blog index, which is useful for identifying blogs within a tag segment
• Partnerships with with other sites (particularly the traditional media)
• The Technorati Top 100, which he argues is a worthwhile metric irregardless of the criticism of the semantics surrounding it.

I’m not sure these benefits are redeeming enough. There is no doubt that Technorati’s crawl and indexed data of the blogosphere is an extremely valuable dataset. The problem is that they have struggled with how to package it for some time now. I remember when I first learned about Technorati several years ago. At the time I was first exposed to Technorati it was a blog search engine that pulled together a variety of content types from posts to Flickr photos on its results pages. There were far fewer blogs and it was easier to distinguish the wheat from the chaff. It has since gone through a number of major redesigns and has never been able to get back on top of the flood of incoming data. Now I feel like if I search on Technorati I get the most recent slew of noise from the Internet, but they don’t really help me find the good stuff.

And, while the site itself is plagued by an identity crises for how users are to interact with it, they have a much bigger problem with spam. I want the popular data to be valuable—really I do. However, in recent months it has only proven to be a career accelerator for D-list Latin celebrities by leaking sex tapes. I could look past those spammed keywords, but it makes me trust the rest of the popular terms less knowing that Noelia, Galilea Montijo, and Wanda Nara are hanging out with them.

Perhaps it’s just me, but I don’t use Technorati at all. I could see it being useful for building keyword lists by using the related tags feature on the top of a results page, but I don’t really build keyword lists these days. I could see the Top 100 or most popular terms or some other data being really useful, but it lacks two important qualities: spam filtering and XML portability. Like Marshall, I see them as a really important site (they were key in bringing visibility to the tag revolution), and I want them to stick around. I think they just need to leave search up to those who do it well and focus on being a data monitoring service for the blogosphere and curbing their spam problem.