Technorati has a brand new CEO, and he’s been busy in his short time with the company. Today Technorati is relaunching, with a new core focus on bloggers.
Last week I saw a demo of the new products, which CEO Richard Jalichandra and VP Engineering Dorion Carroll say reflect the company’s re-dedication to their core audience: bloggers and advertisers.
Technorati Front Page
The recently changed home page, just three months old, is gone. In place of the streaming blog posts is a news aggregator that, like TechMeme and the New York Times’ Blogrunner, use linking behavior on news sites to determine headline news.
Blogs and mainstream media are separated. Blog headlines are on the left; MSM is on the right. Below each headline is a cluster of blogs that have linked to and discussed the story.
The news aggregator complements Technorati’s core strength as a blog search engine, Carroll says. Sometimes users want to search. Other times, they want to discover and browse. The news aggregator helps them see what bloggers and journalists are talking about right now, all over the world.
The topics feature that Technorati launched in September (front page, business, entertainment, lifestyle, politics, sports, technology) is now highlighted directly via navigation tabs on the home page.
This is something Technorati experimented with in the past (see our 2005 coverage of Technorati Explore, which never made it out of the lab), but it never dedicated meaningful resources (or the home page) to finding news patterns in blog posts. Now, the company is dedicating those resources to making it work.
Blogger Central and Today In Photos
In addition to the Front Page news aggregator, Technorati is making two other big additions to the site.
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.
A Fresh Start
The new products are encouraging signs from Technorati, which has had to reinvent itself a number of times over its existence. Their core blog search business has been under fire from Google and others for some time. But the site is still synonymous with blogging for most of us, and has a store of goodwill that has yet to run dry.
Comscore and Compete show slow and erratic growth over the last year. Comscore says they have 5.3 million unique visitors and 20 million page views per month, up from 2.1 million and 9 million, respectively, a year ago. Technorati says those numbers are about half of what their internal stats show.
Will the new product drive core usage and page views? I think it has a real shot. It’s much better than the existing home page (and the one before that, which really pulled away from bloggers). I already visit Technorati multiple times per day. I can see increasing that usage with the new stuff.
On a side note, when I met with Jalichandra, he said the company has raised $21.6 million in venture capital over three rounds of financing. The company has never dislcosed financings before, leaving us and others to speculate based on the occasional publicly filed document to piece it together. Now we have a firm number (and we’re updating CrunchBase).
oh jeez….
technorati.com is down.
it is getting my messy now. I only see letters, i can’t focus.
yup, down.
Also, while this can’t help but be an improvement and I hope it puts them back in the race, the whole MSM vs. blogger dichotomy is BS. It’s a false choice. The kind that MSM-thinking would present and yet it comes from a “bloggers” co.?
What would be an opportunity cost?
Technorati is working for me.
Three of four articles on the blog side are from the Register. Hmmmm. I was complaining yesterday about Blogrunner being guilty of domination by MSM (or a few key news sources) – doesn’t look like Technorati’s found the sweet spot yet either. Yesterday, 58% of Blogrunner’s frontpage was MSM – not exactly the pulse of the blogosphere. While the Register may be off the mainstream, I wouldn’t classify it as a blog either.
I’ve put some thought into how to avoid “dominant source clustering” – i.e.: the wag-the-dog behaviour that people accuse Techmeme of driving. The way I ended up working around it was by mixing linking behaviour with keyword clustering – creating a flatter view of the blogosphere that’s less dominated by the few alpha-sites.
Have a looksee: http://techwatching.com
Damn! Their Google pagerank has dropped to 0! How does that happen?!
Here’s a screenshot gallery of the previous redesigns — Technorati seems to be the most unstable site around in terms of purpose & layout (why don’t they just focus on offering the world’s best backlinks tracking for starters? Google Blog Search is quite buggy):
http://blogosco...-05-25-n87.html
> Damn! Their Google pagerank has dropped
> to 0! How does that happen?!
That’s due to the not-so-brilliant move of redirecting technorati.com to technorati.com/frontpage/.
Here’s one word that describes my review and my video (click my name):
CONFUSION
Some good bits but overall it’s way too confusing.
I feel so ripped off. not cool , technorati . http://www.blogrunner.com
this is way better than the old versions. this is actually useful. i’m going to use technorati.com.
max: uh-huh? are you serious, or just a technorati employee?
technorati is still slow and buggy as hell. I’m constantly finding links on blogsearch for my blogs that I dont see on technorati.
Also: whatever happened to all that data older than 6 months that they just nuked and never put back? Can’t they figure out how to have at least 1 year of history and apply that to the ranks/authority? Google of course goes all the way back and nobody’s even asking for that (though it would be nice)
Technorati is a great idea with terrible, terrible execution.
@13
haha. i guess you are one of those who likes to go thru piles of old newspaper to find things.
Technorati sucked. Hopefully this time they got it right.
The changes look good. I too still use Technorati several times daily and our team has continued to include Technorati tags in the bottom of each blog post and podcast episode.
Keep up the positive changes and I’m sure next year’s growth will be more predictable.
Break a leg guys. I for one would like you to do well.
Maybe now they’ll focus on getting rid of the massive quantities of splogs. I can’t tell you how many blogs pop up in my Technorati watch feed because some bot decided to throw my terms in the middle of 150 other links.
The concept is good but they need to work on the design. Full text frontpage is not very pleasant.
Deadpool. Richard Jalichandra is no saviour…
21 (laurentvw): “full text frontpage is not very pleasant.”
the other day i actually just heard of these websites that are pretty much full frontpage text, but ARE popular. what are they called again oh yea BLOGS.
Again with the redesign.
This reminds me of what we use to say back in the 90’s: “Nothing to do? Let’s hold a meeting!” It’s mean, it’s a LOT better than the “ticker” they had at the top of the front page (yeesh).
I hope they can regain what they once had, but you’re a virgin only twice.
Is anyone paying attention?
That is the key question that this blog post raised for me. Technorati and most other sites that try to experiment with “discovery” as opposed to “search” focus on surfacing the “most popular blog posts.”
However, I would say that often the “most popular” is not “the most interesting.” Instead, finding out what is “most interesting” is a lot harder but can result in a far better discovery engine. I talked more about this at my blog post here:
http://socialra...ying-attention/
I agree with Mike #25… but I still give this newest launch a limited lifespan.
Jon
These changes look great and should add life to the big green blogsearch. The only challenge as I see it, is managing the content. Content is the dependency, the threat and will make it useful.
Technorati is in a corner — they don’t want to burn users, but they can’t afford to burn bloggers, either. I think the only way to please both, is to remove the Splogs. Not just by manual reports, but by means of working with the free blogspam aggregation service, Akisment.Even if they paid Akisment $0.0001 per blogspam asset, it’s still pennies on the dollar for a quality search result for users.
I’ll be watching how this turns out. Thanks, Michael for the in-depth review.
~ Joe
Nice review Michael, it would be great if you add tips to gain authority rank in technorati.
“what’s percolating in blogs now”
big words, big words.
Unfortunately the interface doesn’t still inspire. It makes you feel you want more information laid out neatly so you understand what is going on the world, while simultaneously it feels cluttered and confusing and uninspiring.
My feed reader give me a better feel than this. So, still room for improvement.
technorati’s PR is still 8. who says it’s 0??
I really hate Technorati’s new look. They were fine the way they were. The other thing I hate is when you click a link it always takes you to another one of their pages. Technorati is a good tool, but the overall usability sucks.
They change so often they should perhaps consider chaning their name to something appealing to consumers.
Just was we “bloggers” need, something else to figure out.
Mr. Arrigton thank you for listening to the Bloggers!
Cool post
would you write review about new Bookmarking web site http://www.Tagza.com
very interesting, but I don’t agree with you
Idetrorce
very interesting
cool post
My new blog:http://www.mowangzhai.com
Is technorati still effective?
techcrunch up, up and up ..
Blogs and mainstream media are separated this is contradiction