Technorati relaunched its site tonight, changing and adding key features. Most notable is an expanded and fresher top 100 blogs list, and a new feature that lets authors post their content directly to the site.
In 2007 Technorati redesigned the look and functionality of its home page three times. Here’s the first. And the second. The last change, made under the direction of incoming CEO Richard Jalichandra, has stayed more or less constant since then.
In the meantime, Technorati has focused on expanding it’s business in other areas, particularly in handling advertising for other sites. Today, only a small percentage of Technorati’s total network traffic of 25 million U.S. unique visitors per month actually visit Technorati.com.
But that doesn’t mean the flagship site isn’t an important asset. And those of us blogging for more than a couple of years can remember the days when Technorati was a key blogging tool, providing, among other things, a high quality real time search engine back when Google only indexed most blogs every few weeks.
Today Technorati still provides a great blog search engine and keeps what many call the definitive Top 100 list of blogs. With the new site, they are focusing more on direct Technorati content (more on that below), and properly categorizing the more popular blogs.
Go check it out yourself, and here’s a rundown of the new features:
Top 100 Blogs:
Top 100 Blogs: Until today, the top 100 blogs were determined based on unique links from other blogs during the previous six months. The top list was fairly static. Now they are focusing much more on recent data within the last month and giving blogs an authority rank between 1 – 1,000. Scoring factors include posting frequency, context, linking behavior and “other inputs.” The result, says the company, is a lot more volatility in the lists as blogs surge up and down.
Technorati is also categorizing blogs among a variety of topics, and providing separate lists of top blogs for each topic. Here’s Business, for example, and Gadgets.
Publish Directly To Technorati:
Authors can now choose to publish content directly to Technorati to gain exposure to a wider audience. This content is highlighted on the top of the Technorati.com home page. For bloggers with a big audience this won’t be attractive. But if I was just starting out with blogging, I’d post some of my content here to gain exposure, and then cross post to my own blog. Each writer has a profile with links to their site and content they’ve written on Technorati.
Search:
Technorati is changing search to give much more weight towards authority and relevance over recency. For highly queried terms like “iPhone,” this cuts out a lot of noise and helps people find quality/definitive content more quickly. Users can also choose to search for blogs relevant to the query or posts elevant to the query, depending on what they are looking for.
Topical Content:
Technorati still shows outside content on a topical basis, too. The light green navigation bar at the top has topics like “Technology” and “Sports.” Content shown on that channel includes stuff directly written on Technorati as well as posts from blogs with high authority for the topic.
“it’s” should be “its”.
The old site was withering; glad to see they’re pushing up new content again.
Looking really good to me. Congrats to the team, still life in this one!
Why limit it to the top 100 blogs? Why not show the top 1000? Why not break it out by category and location? Why not measure microblogging? The more I visit Technorati the less reason I have a blogger to go back.
yeah i could have been clearer on that. See Jen McLean’s comment below.
Actually I dare say that the search is better than before too, in addition to their listings. I think I was grumpy too fast with that comment…
@Michael Pinto we did – you can find that here: http://technora...logs/directory/ and more is in store for twittorati.com as well.
Maybe you’re right, this is looking better as I’m looking about — I’ll explore it a bit more! The new interface takes some getting use to…
is this the 20th time technorati relaunches itself?
Agee with Michael above and wonder why they have to limit it to 100 blogs? I am sure they could easily do a thousand and better still get the top 100 per country as there would be real value in that. We all have a good idea of blogs in the top 100 but the smaller ones are harder to figure out at a glance
You can go pretty deep into the directory. The rest is coming.
For instance: http://technora...hnology/page-7/
I only see 95 entries on that list. I wanted to know why made it to 100. not tonight i guess.
http://www.tech.../top100/page-4/
oh i see what happened there… nvm!
echo comments is new right?
Did they get rid of the dreaded technorati monster?
I am not a regular reader of Technorati, and the new design is certainly not going to change that.
Way way too much green, and not enough differentiation between the different sections.
The ads pop out at me more than the content and seem to take up more room than the content. Yes, I understand that they need ads, but come on, are we not yet at the point where we can make them more appealing at integrated into the design?
Seems like Technorati has tried redesigning quite a few times and I recommend trying again.
I cant see anything on Technorati’s about page!! http://www.tech...out-technorati/
Has anybody noticed that?
I see that they insist on using that horrible italic font
Is this a directory, a search engine, or an online billboard??
i like this green Ul style
This UI looks pretty good. I like the feature on “today in technorati” as well.
Its very greeny .. I still feel it should work on its layout .. and make it look little better …. just a suggestion ..
Best,
Daina
Green is the new profit.
Somehow, while browsing the site, I’ve been redirected to the new Technorati Admin backend.
It happened while I was updating my profile. I got redirected here: http://technora...article/article
It looks like the new Technorati site is powered by the Scrive CMS made by Digitalus. The same CMS used to power http://blogcritics.com
I hope the Technorati crew find this message, I’ve pinged them on Twitter too. Accessing the admin backend is probably not what they want people to be able to do, even if I couldn’t make any changes.
I’ve retraced my steps and can recreate the error every time now. Looks like the add photo feature is borked. Redirects to the admin site every time.
Thanks for the info. This helps clarify things. Apparently they just want to destroy technorati and try to turn it into a new blogcritics.
That won’t work of course.
The profile image upload should be working now. Thanks!
A welcome step.
There is not enough ads on the homepage.
Definitely not enough ads. And the ads in their ad network are neither garish nor deceptive. Screenshot:
http://www.flic...ies/4012021627/
Teeth whitening anyone?
unless their new URL is http://blogsearch.google.com/ it just doesn’t matter
Technorati just committed suicide, in case none of you actually USE technorati.
Technorati just deleted 99% of their pages. They deleted ALL of their reactions, blog post, and tag backpages. There are no more reactions, and tags exclude anyone who has under 100 authority, a betrayal of all the little guys who used to link to them (nobody above 100 authority links to technorati tags directly, for example, only the little guys).
So don’t be surprised to see Technorati go from 8.2 million pages in google, to maybe 200,000. Likewise, watch their traffic drop to nothing.
Who the hell wants to read Technorati “user content”? They just want to utilize their power to try and get a bunch of people to write for free on their site (they probably were frustrated that all they had was duplicate content on their site).
It won’t work and they just committed corporate suicide and they can’t even see it.
Jack, I’m not sure what use case made you arrive at that conclusion, but we absolutely did NOT delete 99% of our pages. Tag and post pages are still there, perhaps in different form and fashion than you found them before.
Also, we have not eliminated or excluded results from blogs with lower Authority. That said, post searches do default to results from high authority blogs in hopes of delivering the most consistently relevant results, which is what you might be seeing. You can still do a more advanced search and fetch blogs with any Authority ranking.
I agree with Jack. There is much less content and all about top 100, and percentages that nobody cares about. It used to have a lot of blogs (text) on there now it looks like a plain analytics page. Nobody wants to see any ranks, percentages, lists. There are very few content on the webpage now. It used to present all the blogs on the frontpage, now you have to search them. Nobody likes searching and much rather have everything presented to them in the first page. I want you guys to succeed, but the overall page is not catchy at all. Please think about displaying all the irrelevant blogs and what not and stick it to the users’ face. Nobody is going to search and you might lose traffic.
Wow, I didn’t expect a response from the CEO.
As for the 99% of your content, claim. Maybe 99% is a bad number. But certainly have deleted a *majority* of your pages. If you look through google, most of technorati’s pages are blog posts, followed by tag backpages, reactions and their backpages.
ALL of that is gone. I know because I have many of those pages bookmarked and get error messages.
Or did you not realize that reactions, reaction backpages, tag backpages, and individual blog posts were probably 7 of those 8 million pages crawled in google?
The only reason why I ever visited Technorati was the ?reactions suffix (I’m a sufferer of a hosting that does not provide an access to server logs). Technorati was SUPERIOR TO GOOGLE in this. Google’s “blog search” omits lots of links and is extremely capricious in it (this is not just “blog search fault though, in general their “link:” search misses a lot). Dropping this feature removes any incentive to use Technorati.
Techno-who? This company is dead. A few years ago they were somebody. Today they are nobody. They really ought to just close shop.
I prefer using techmeme… which usually ends up as a directory to techcrunch
mmm i prefer the old version…
the new one is not working for me…i try to edit…and doesnt work…
also the follower page disappear…
and many pages with “suggested” blogs are disappear…
maybe is just my problem.
Where’s the old Ping form located now? I have to manually ping for one blog.
Jack, I noticed the same thing — most blogs have been deleted. Reactions are missing. It’s really too bad.
What’s the point of a revamp if you are broken? With all the deleted blogs and screwed authority numbers, it’s even more broken than it was before.
Can they just scrap Technorati one and for all? Just build a curated manual top 100 list and I suppose it will have about the same value.
I’m kinda interested to see where all this goes, particularly since one of my pieces (on Obama and the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell policy) made the front page of the new site.
I can tell you that as of 9:35PM it hasn’t pushed a flood of traffic to my personal site though.
Still, I’m glad to be there and hope they can turn this into something good.
My favorite Technorati feature is when the monster escapes.
I am new to this place………..will comment soon
Is the chart feature still avail on Technorati?
At one point I wanted to build a new service using the Technorati API. I wrote to them, using the email that they suggest, to get a developer key. I didn’t hear from them. (And why do I need to write for permission? Why not an open process like what Google has for its API?) I wrote again. A week went by. I didn’t hear from them. I wrote again. I half forgot about my idea. A month went by. Still nothing. I wrote again, then tracked down the list of staff-blogs, and wrote to the staff whose emails I could find. Still nothing. I posted a comment on one or two of the blogs. Never heard from anyone. I forgot about the project. 4 or 5 months went by. Suddenly I had some free time and thought again about the project. I wrote to them again. Still never heard back from them.
I’m left to conclude that they were not serious about offering a public API for developers to work with.
I logged in to Technorati today and at first I thought my account was hacked – my avatar was gone, all my blog ratings dropped to 1… is this also part of the new redesign?
It’s the same Technorati all over again.
They eliminated pinging. They eliminated your favorites. They wiped a great many Authority numbers to 1. Can’t update the information in your profile except for putting in an avatar, which they originally deleted.
No categories. But they love the top 100 blogs.
They can send company marketing email, but can’t be bothered to email let their members ahead of time what is about to happen to their profiles and what to expect.
They obviously care little for Wordpress platform bloggers who have Technorati based programming running behind the scenes. Now all the Site admins have to go in and adjust code on their sites and the plugin creators have to update all the plugins that have Technorati associated with them.
This is how Technorati has always been. Not once in all these years of being a member have they ever answered one of my emails.
Facebook runs a better Networked blogs system … then so does many of the other blogging networks.
Yawn to Technorati.