While battling reliability and scaling issues Technorati is forging ahead with new services. David Sifry announced the launch of their Blog Finder service. The basic premise is to rank blogs by category or technically speaking, by tags. David says in his blog that new service answers the question, "How can you find authoritative blogs on a subject?" This is what Robert Scoble was asking for on Monday.
I took a quick look around at the new service this evening and here are my initial impressions.
The initial version of the listings was built by using category and tag data that blogs had already submitted. Right out of the box, the lists are very BETA. For example, some bloggers use the category 'PR' instead of 'Public Relations'. As such, Neville Hobson's blog is listed as the Most Authorative blog on 'PR' but is nowhere to be found on the list for 'Public Relations' blogs. This blog is listed as the 11th Most Authorative Blog for 'Public Relations' and 'PR'. Jeremy Pepper would get a kick out of this since he and I have talked about the fact that I'm not really a true PR blogger :-)
I am also listed as the Most Authorative blog for 'Orlando' even though I rarely write about Orlando. Why? I guess becuase I have tagged more posts Orlando than other bloggers.
There are other issues as well. In the 'PR' search, Neville's blog is listed in three places, under three different URLs. (nevon.net/nevon/, nevon.typepad.com and nevon.typepad.com/nevon/) This is due to the fracturing of data within Technorati's index. If you remember Neville discovered this when he was having problems with Technorati's search tool.
Also Steve Rubel is not listed under 'PR' or 'Public Relations', but he is second for 'Podcasting' behind Dave Winer.
If you have a Technorati account and have claimed your blog, you can specify the tags you want associated with your blog. I looked at this option and it does allow you to specify up to 20 tags for your blog. One problem I noticed though was it didn't always save my changes. I removed a few generic tags such as 'Stuff' (one of my categories) and replaced it with something else. A few minutes later I returned to the entry screen and a number of tags were repeated and some of my original tags were no longer there. Hopefully they'll fix this.
Overall this should be a very talked about feature. The initial bugs I noticed should be able to be cleaned up. We'll see how the rest of the blogosphere reacts in the coming days. And unfortunately, we'll also see how soon the spammers begin to manipulate the results.
Update 9.2.05 #1 Robert Scoble has noticed one of the issues I saw last night. Robert was able to make his blog the Most Authorative blog about 'Apple'.
Last night I entered the tag 'Tampa' for my blog via Technorati's configuration tool and I became the Most Authorative blog about Tampa, even though I never write about Tampa.
Update 9.2.05 #2 BL says she's surprised that her blog is #1 for 'Public Relations'.
Update 9.2.05 #3 Tris Hussey has his review/thoughts on the new service.
Update 9.2.05 #4 I've posted some further analysis on Blog Finder.
Visitor Comments
Josh,
you've got some great points. We did a bootstrap using post-level tags and categories to get the directory going, and hopefully to make it useful enough that you'd be interested in setting your blog tags to what you actually want.
Thanks for the great feedback!
Dave
Posted by: David Sifry | September 2, 2005 1:44 AM
Dave I think setting your own tags is one of the problems with the service. I went to the configure interface and entered the tag 'Tampa' in my blog. A quick check then showed I was the #1 blog for Tampa, even though I never write about Tampa.
Scoble did the same thing for Apple:
http://radio.weblogs.com/0001011/2005/09/02.html#a11018
Posted by: Josh Hallett | September 2, 2005 8:54 AM
I just did a handful of searches on areas that interest me and the results could not be further off.
• user experience
• usability
• interface design
• industrial design
The only elements on the page that matched my search results were the Google ads. None of the top site were close to what I would consider an authority.
As someone looking for content, as opposed to looking for readers of content I produce, I'm failing to see the value. I certainly didn't find authoritative blogs on any of the subjects I looked for, just more of the big blog guys doing their big blog thing. I just don't see how an opt-in model makes this a valid tool.
However, I will give it some time and check back to see what the response is among quality, subject matter sites. Because right now it just looks like the über-blog and blog-as-business crowd is up there. The challenge will be ensuring blogs are self-policed and tagged properly.
Posted by: jharr | September 2, 2005 10:53 AM
Josh - is there anything you can do if your data is segmented in Technorati? I appeared three times as well for some reason, though I've never changed blogging software, the URLs etc.
I have the same issues with the Configuration not saving the relevant tags. And sometimes if you hit 'PR' under the Blog Finder it says there aren't any blogs with that tag at all.
I'm sure Dave and his team will sort this, but is there anything we can do from this end?
Morgan
Posted by: Morgan McLintic | September 3, 2005 3:56 PM