Warren Seen

It’s been a busy few days for me, but I’m back in time to notice this:

Technorati has just added ‘authority’ filtering to their search (see Scoble, TechCrunch, Dave Sifry, et cetera).

My issue with this is simple – the number of inbound links does NOT necessarily qualify the source as being an “authority” on anything. This is nothing more than a popularity contest.

Ben Barren hits the nail on the head here.

So its very hard to determine relative popularity, on a regional basis

Before pointing to this New York Metro quote:

In the blogosphere, the biggest audiences—and the advertising revenue they bring—go to a small, elite few. Most bloggers toil in total obscurity.

Popularity, that’s all it is. And that’s sad, because some of the people who deserve to be held as authorities in their field are lost amongst the noise, while the “blogosphere” (gack, I HATE that “word”) becomes more and more like a conversation between a panel of “A-list” bloggers with everyone else on the sideline. Then you’ve flipped from being “citizen” media to just media.

Disparate thoughts to follow…

• Blog search the way Technorati does it is fundamentally broken. Ranking based purely on “link love” is primitive at best. Calling it “Authority” filtering is inaccurate. That’s a big call to make, but I’m going to be dumb and stand by that one…
• It’s broken because it causes new blogs to be put in a catch 22 – if you want to get noticed, you have to get links. If you want to get links you need to get noticed in the first place.
• Even if you can get some traffic driven to your blog from eg Technorati, how do you make it sticky? The majority of my page views reported by awstats are in the 30 second region. The next highest is the 30-60 second. It tails off quickly after that.
• Have you ever wondered about the great bloggers you haven’t read? How will you ever find them if no one links to them?
• Don’t you wish you could find blogs similar to the ones you already read? Or ones that provide a counter-point? ie “Show more like this…”
• I’m not talking about just keyword matching here, it’s a far more sophisticated problem than it appears. Memetrackers DON’T do this… bet you wish they could.
• What if your aggregator sorted items from your feeds by relevance? Think a mutant cross between reddit and amazon.com’s “for you” for your feeds. Key word filtered “smart” folders are dumb by comparison.
• What if technorati did the same? Why should I have to manually create my watch list, when technorati knows what I search for regularly? Hell, they know what I tag, that’s a BFC (big effing clue) right there…

time for the (long) tail to wag the dog.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 15th, 2006 at 12:12 am and is filed under blog, technorati, web2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.