Blog Search Engine Technorati Relaunches… Again
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Written By Sepideh Saremi | December 5, 2007 | Share This
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Blog search engine Technorati yesterday rolled out the third iteration of its homepage over the last few months, this one featuring something called the Percolator. Remarkably similar to tech aggregator Techmeme (read: it’s basically a Techmeme clone), Technorati Percolator aggregates popular online content of various categories from blogs and the news, and lists related posts about those topics. Previous redesigns had cleaned up the site’s design while integrating other media, and attempted to show minute-by-minute (or what ended up being more like second-by-second) news, respectively. But from a design and usability standpoint, this latest Technorati is like a visual assault. Though the idea of a memetracker/aggregator is far more useful and user-friendly than its “Topics” homepage had been, I’m inclined to agree with those who think the change is too little, too late for Technorati.
However, Technorati’s relaunch is yet another instance in the huge trend across the media and publishing world - particularly in news - of integrating aggregation and social media features. The New York Times’ Blogrunner, for instance, was recently integrated on its Technology homepage to show top headlines from around the web. But more interesting and more useful than the exclusive or echo-chamber effect of many aggregators - whose sources are either hand-picked by editors (as with Blogrunner) or are the product of an algorithm (Techmeme), what’s more compelling are implementations that allow users to become more engaged with sites by actually contributing their own content. One recent example is that just yesterday the LA Times made a “strategic investment” in social news site Mixx, which is a sort of Digg and StumbleUpon hybrid in that it shows popular stories but does so on an individual user level. What’s cool about this is that the LA Times will, according to VentureBeat, “deliver user-driven content suggestions to its web site, starting with its travel section. It lets users see what other users like them have also viewed.” I think this idea has really excellent potential to create a real community on the site - something many publishers are striving toward but few are achieving.
Topics: Media Convergence, Publishing, Social Media, Technology |
This is a positive sign of life from Technorati. It shows that they’re actively trying to address issues important to their users. The changes they’ve made may not be as important as the fact that they’re simply making changes — showing the world that “hey, we’re alive and doing stuff to improve our service.”
The question is: What will they do next. I think one of the main things they need to consider doing is improving their infrastructure. A recurring complaint from even loyal Technorati users is that Technorati is unreliable. It’s easy to see this at Zuula blog search, for example, where the Technorati server response times (see the top of the search results) are consistently several seconds, and sometimes in the double digit seconds. Compare that to Google blog search … or even IceRocket!
Blog search is definitely getting interesting again!