Stake Your Claim? Technorati Opens Goldrush-Inspired Tag Directory

Technorati has just launched a new directory of ‘tag’ pages, offering brief overviews of a variety of tech-related topics. Tag pages range from broad subjects like ‘internet’ to individual companies, with each page offering links to relevant articles, blog posts, user-written summaries, and related topics on Technorati (in some ways the pages are reminiscent of Mahalo’s topical overviews). Unfortunately, while these tags could eventually serve as a handy glossary to the web, it seems that in an effort to quickly build up content Technorati is openly inviting users to submit articles that are less than objective.

Technorati can automatically generate listings of recent blog posts relating to each tag, but it still has to rely on users to write the summaries for each page. To entice writers, the site is allowing users to include links to their own blogs or webpages in their submissions (provided they’re relevant):

“This is a unique opportunity for authors, brands, agencies, experts and content sites with some significant benefits. Your tag article will appear on Technorati.com with a writer credit. You will be seen as the definitive expert on a tag subject – by millions of readers. Your article can include links to useful references and sites, including your own, if relevant, as well as your own byline link. It’s also really easy to contribute: tag articles are only 2-3 paragraphs, between 100 and 200 words, and can live for years as evergreen content.”

To further entice writers, Technorati is making each tag page first come, first served (there’s apparently no voting system in place to float the most objective summaries to the top), so this is effectively a gold rush period. Technorati says that each tag page will be overseen by trusted editors in the Blogcritics community to reject overly commercial submissions, but it still seems like the system is openly inviting self-serving and biased summaries.

For more, check out Technorati’s blog post here.