The Last Podcast

Technorati, the once mighty blog search engine, has added a new (and quite useless) product to its lineup, Technorati Topics:

Each topic features blog posts from many of the best blogs out there to help you discover what’s going on. The posts are refreshed frequently to reflect breaking news, new opinions, and the latest from the Web. We’ve set out to help you find some great blog posts to read and we’ve organized them by easy to browse topics. We considered a number of factors to get the seed list of blogs including Technorati Authority, frequency of posting, use of relevant tags, links to related subject matter and general topicality.

The things is, this is basically a scrolling list of blog posts. There is actually no need for the scrolling feature, except that one can do it and that is give the reader a false sense of currency. The scroll adds nothing to making the site usable. Also, at first glance, it looks like these are live updates, but as Josh Catone at Read/WriteWeb noticed, this is really just a repeating loop and often features old content:

Reloading sometimes causes the scroll to back up to the beginning and the time stamp is oddly different on each topic (and as the screenshot below indicates, I’m not sure why today’s new blog posts in the sports category were previews of games that happened over 24 hours ago).

Overall, this is a useless feature, that won’t help Technorati much in its current struggle to regain any of its lost mindshare in the blogsphere. I used to like Technorati. It used to be my #1 tool for checking what is going on in the blogosphere. However, today, memetrackers like Techmeme and Tailrank have completely taken over my time. I don’t think I searched for anything on Technorati in the last couple of months. If I do search, I use Google’s Blogsearch - it is faster in picking up stories and seems more accurate to me. And unlike Technorati, I doesn’t randomly stop indexing my posts.

The overall reception has been lackluster.

TechCrunch even shied away from describing what Topics does:

It would be easy to be unkind to Technorati, and some may suggest that the move today is a case of shuffling the deck chairs on the Titanic.

Allen Stern is less kind in his evaluation:

This is why I like TechMeme for my tech news. I can see at a glance which stories are hot, check a variety of opinions from the a-list, the wanna be a-list and all of the others. With Topics all I see is what they feed to me.

Mathew Ingram, too, doesn’t mince any words, either:

What the heck is this company thinking? They have no CEO, their database comes under fire repeatedly for its lack of reliability, and this is the best they can do?