Cynics Unlimited

Famed weblog ping service Technorati recently revealed a new and cleaner interface. Most noteworthy is the emphasis on categorization and [what appears to be] hand-picked content, making Technorati look more like a traditional news portal. Perhaps these changes were in response to the constant grumbling among some bloggers about the aggregator’s declining usefulness.

Dave Lucas at Capital Region people described the immediate problem in a recent post:

I associated this weblog with Technorati VERY EARLY in the game and there was a time when hundreds of hits a day came my way from blogders searching Technorati, but those days are gone. The most hits I got recently came within 15 minutes of the posting of an artcile on the World Cup. After 15 minutes my entry was lost way down on page 5 of T’rati. In my webstats for the last two days, I have NO TRAFFIC incoming via Technorati, and I believe users of the service, like myself, are now taking advantage of OTHER services and tools Technorati provides.

As Lucas stated, Technorati was originally an invaluable source of web traffic to weblogs – both new and established. However, the primary aggregator service has become less effective for two reasons:

1. Too Much Content

Technorati is tracking just short of 50 million weblogs. To join the service all you have to do is sign up and add some javascript code to your web page. It is also possible to be tracked simply by pinging the RPC service (no signup required). As a general purpose aggregator, Technorati originally sorted its content into categories (Business, Tech, Sports, etc) but even within those categories there hundreds of thousands of weblogs postings. New weblogs or weblogs without previously established reputations can easily get lost in the shuffle.

The recent addition of MySpace weblogs also presents a quality issue. As a realtime news tracker, Technorati uses a combination of keywords and age to index posts - if, for example, you put the word “rhombicosidodecahedron” in your weblog then it will be placed at the top of the search results so long as it was the most recent weblog containing that term. Observations so far suggest that MySpace users rarely write focused or meaningful material – after all it is a social networking site more famous for underage voyeurism than thoughtful commentary. The meaningless content that often emanates from MySpace blogs can quickly put a well-reasoned post on page 5 of Technorati’s search engine.

2. Gaming the System

As you’ve probably guessed by now, the trick to getting maximum traffic from Technorati is getting to the top of the search results for the most popular terms. The website solves ½ of the problem for you by giving you the top search items and tags at any given moment, naturally encouraging some bloggers to check the Technorati front page when deciding on a topic. However, as implied in the previous section, one’s post only needs to contain the popular keyword to get chronologically listed. Thus, gong back to our example, your thoughtful 500 word post on Archimedean solids (which includes rhombicosidodecahedrons) could be quickly bumped by a nonsensical post containing the phrase “I really like the word rhombicosidodecahedron. It makes me laugh”. More often than not, the blogger generating nonsensical posts is gaming the system in hopes of getting more webtraffic.

Subtler forms of gaming include auto-posting newswire feeds, frequently commenting on technorati’s top search keywords or participating in the New York Times Op-Ed reprinting ritual (the latter seems to be a self-feeding game that puts the full title of the column within the top 10 search items every Sunday).

In case you were wondering, this is what a rhombicosidodecahedron looks like. Don’t waste your time “gaming” on this term.

The aforementioned factors contribute heavily to the 15 minute decline Lucas and many other veteran bloggers now lament. Technorati is still far from useless – a trackback from the right reader can generate a lot of traffic and perhaps a few new industry friends. However, the window of exposure is now considerably smaller and bloggers can no longer rely solely on Technorati for marketing.