I am an investor in Technorati and I am sorry to see that Dave Sifry left the day to day management of the company.  I am also sorry to see that now “authority” as a concept has been taken out from the home page of Technorati and relegated to www.s.technorati.com a hack that few know.  Now if I was advising Technorati this is what I would say.

1)  Competing with Google is tough, very tough.  But Technorati has a formula that works and that is PINGING vs Google´s crawl.  Pinging is faster than crawling.  Pinging relies on people´s desire to disseminate what they write be it blogs or news.  Crawling is like spying on people and showing what they wrote whether they like it or not.   Technorati should stick to being the best search engine of PINGED news.

2)  Authority was a great concept.  Bring it back!

3)  You have the PINGS from newspapers and news organizations.  Use them!  If Digg does not differentiate news sources as to whether they are corporate or blogged, why should you?  Pls include news organizations in your results!

4)  Pinging is also great to follow a story.  Technorati must find a graphical way to show unfolding stories.  Search results are pictures.  There must be an elegant way to show, search….the movie.

So as I said I am an investor in Technorati.  But then Google is an investor in Fon and I am very happy for their support.   To me this is not about whether I like Google more than Technorati.  Is about a world of search that should at least have a few flavors and Technorati was close to giving me what I wanted, and they moved away from it.  Hope they come around.

Follow Martin Varsavsky on Twitter: twitter.com/martinvars

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Lucas on September 13, 2007  · 

The Google Blog Search Service does support pinging.
http://www.google.com/help/blogsearch/about_pinging.html

3.0 rating

Ian Kallen on September 14, 2007  · 

Martin,
The simplification of the user interface earlier this year was a contentious and a confusing issue. There are certainly many amongst us at Technorati who share your view; the simplification and addition of the s.technorati.com interface succeeded only in confusing our existing visitors while doing little to benefit the new ones.

The recently re-done (again) home page and the “topics” initiative is the first of what will be a number of corrections and enhancements to the outward facing site you see as well as the internal technologies and operations that make it all work. Stay tuned.
-Ian

3.0 rating

luca on September 14, 2007  · 

I’m using Technorati less and less, I liked it as it was before. And, in addition, there is now a big mess for authority. If you change domain name but the blog is the same, you loose all you “authority”.

3.0 rating

Lucas on September 19, 2007  · 

Another point to note is Google’s acquisition of Feedburner earlier this year, giving them real-time indexing capabilities to all RSS feeds/updates.

3.0 rating

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