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Technorati Relaunches

Posted By Darren Rowse 5th of December 2007 Blogging Tools and Services 0 Comments

Technorati have just relaunched with a renewed focus on bloggers.

There’s a number of changes – firstly a new front page (which isn’t showing to me at their homepage yet for me) with news aggregation – like TechMeme. They call it the ‘Percolator’ as it shows what’s been ‘percolating’ in the blogosphere. There’s also category pages with a similar format (business, entertainment, lifestyle, politics, sport and technology).

Secondly there’s a new section called Blogger Central which is particularly for bloggers. It shows some interesting information including a ‘top tags’ section which shows trends in what tags have been used recently (including a mini chart) and blog posts about blogging.

Picture 2-22

It also shows rising posts of the day and links to the popular blogs pages.

Note: I obviously have a bias – but I’d love this page to include more than just news and high level discussion about blogging on this page – but perhaps also a section specifically for ‘blog tips’. If the idea is that it’s a page that resources bloggers by providing useful information about blogging – why not aggregate some of the best tips from the meta-blog community?

There seem to be more tools also which I’m still exploring.

I think that these are positive signs from Technorati. Their strength has always been in tracking the blogosphere and I’m glad to see them going with their strengths. I can’t wait to see the new launch – particularly that Blogger Central section.

Read more about the changes on the Technorati blog – intro to the changes, discovery, news and blogs on the new Technorati and use the Technorati Percolator to Discover the Real Time Web.

Update – More on the changes at TechCrunch, Marketing Pilgrim, Center Networks and ReadWriteWeb.

Update 2 – One thing that I’ve noticed is that on the front page – in the percolating blog posts section they don’t link from the front page directly to the blogs at all but to a secondary page which does have the link as well as other blogs linking to it. However on the Mainstream Media section they do link to the news source directly as well as their own aggregation page.

Let me illustrate:

Blog-Example

Msm-Example

OK – so it’s not a massive deal. But I’d have thought that for consistencies sake they’d have done the same for both mainstream media stories and blog stories.

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. Sounds good. Haven’t heard from Technorati in a long time. Maybe this will help them get out of the current slump they’re in.

  2. Good…some movement forward. I am new to blogging and I have been working up Technorati…I would like to do more with it.

  3. Nice to see some changes. Can’t say that the failure to link more directly to the blog early on pleases me. Not exactly user friendly, and if they have a thing about giving links there’s always ‘nofollow’.

    Think of the users, Technorati. Making people click all around your site is not making it better for them. People want to be able to reach the story they’re seeing with a click.

    But good to see them rethinking how they function. Time for me to go back and look them over again. It’s been a while.

  4. I guess they want to keep the front page slick and usable, and try to get more page impression from the rest of the site.

  5. It’s been some time since technorati last update their design.

  6. Is it just me, or does anyone else see this linking to internal pages with other people’s titles, names and content as splogging? It’s not okay anywhere else…Since it’s Technorati, splogging is okay?

  7. Great info – I can always count on you to break the story first.

  8. I like Technorati and visit it daily but I find that they have a lot of glitches and bugs. Sometimes it takes several days for an incoming link to my blog to register, and sometimes a link never registers at all (despite the fact that the linking blog or site is claimed). The Technorati monster seems to get out a lot, and lately I’ve gone to my user page only to find that all my blogs have disappeared. I wish they’d focus on their existing functionality before doing a re-launch.

    -Melissa Donovan
    Writing FORWARD

  9. Think of the users, Technorati. Making people click all around your site is not making it better for them. People want to be able to reach the story they’re seeing with a click.

  10. I for one am glad Technorati is making this move. I’m happy they are going back to their core-competency and getting back to their blogging roots. I’ve rooted for Technorati for a long time (despite all their problems), and look forward to any new tools they might develop for us bloggers.

  11. If they are going to republish content from blogs then I think they should credit the blog with a direct link. But I guess they stand more chance of getting some advertising deal out of direct links to media companies?

    Thanks for the latest news Darren all the same.

  12. I can’t seem to find it. Is there a way to still ping your blog?

  13. I just went there coincidentally today and I really like the changes. I do wonder how they choose the blogs on their front page though. it would be nice to see some ‘other’ blogs – not the usual big name peeps.

  14. I hate the new look. I went in yesterday and found it quite a bit harder for navigation of new posts.

  15. I haven’t been tagging my posts for a while.. guess I should start again..

  16. I think that this is great news for Technorati, maybe this could lead to more subscriptions for us.

  17. I usually just check my blog’s technorati page and leave… I rarely use it to search for anything. No real need to.

  18. Too many splogs are popping up, making use of other bloggers’ rss feeds to populate their sites. I would love to see technorati filter these out.

  19. I’m with Melissa – I wish they’d just concentrate on getting the basic functionality to work properly first!

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