The Return of Technorati

Frederic    blogging    

I have been harsh with Technorati in the past, but their relaunch today is actually something they can be proud of.

A few weeks ago, I pointed out that if anybody could take on Techmeme, it would be Technorati, if only it could get its act together. Judging from the this update, they might just be on the right way to become relevant again.

They have now introduced a Techmeme/Blogrunner like frontpage and, maybe more importantly for bloggers, a feature called Blogger Central. Some of the features of Blogger Central include a list of todays top tags, the blog posts with the most blog reactions (though not organized by category, which means that political posts tend to top the list), and blog posts about blogging.

The only thing I am not quite clear about is how those “blog posts about blogging” are chosen. It looks like there is some human editorial work at hand there, but I am not quite sure.

The frontpage is clearly driven by Technorati Authority (though my post on AIM in Gmail made it onto the site as well). It’s not quite clear how the secondary headlines are chosen here either.

As TechCrunch points out, the focus here is clearly on getting the focus back on blogging and getting back to the basics that made Technorati a success in the first place (before it lost its focus):

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.

For a different perspective, see Allen Stern’s post. He is confused.

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