Thing 13

I have to admit, I’m not a big fan of Technorati.  I find the site itself messy and not aesthetically pleasing, and I think it’s very frustrating to use.  It’s interesting to see which blog posts have linked to other blogs posts, but at some point it just becomes a ridiculous morass of meta-information.  I don’t want to have to click through several pages just to read the story that caught my eye on the front page!

Technorati raises some interesting questions, though, about the ever-blurring distinction between bloggers and reporters and also the difference between blog posts and regular articles on websites.  Technorati seems to list everything, from Reuters news to celebrity fan blogs, with little to tell them apart besides broad categories.  Blogs are rated by “Technorati Authority”, which measures the number of blogs linking to a particular site within the past six months.  The blog with the highest authority number has the distinction of being the #1 blog on Technorati (until, of course, another comes along to knock it off its perch).  This is an especially interesting example of the popularity-as-authority model that seems to be at work on the internet most of the time – as if the more eyes that read something, the more true it becomes!

The site does seem to do a good job at identifying “what’s percolating in blogs right now” (as it says on the homepage).  I don’t know that I would use Technorati as a search engine to find blogs to subscribe to, but it seems like a great way to “take the pulse” of the information buzzing around the internet on any given day.  For example, today it’s the economy, Angelina Jolie’s already-infamous breastfeeding magazine cover, and the release of a new Sony laptop making blog headlines.  It is very interesting to see what passes for newsworthy in the “blogosphere” as opposed to on “real” news sites.