January 24, 2008

Technorati's Latest Change: Front Page Revamp

If there's anything constant about Technorati, it's change. The last few months have been extremely bumpy for the once world-leading blog search and tagging engine, with executive changes, the more than occasional outage, and reduced relevance in the face of Google Blog Search.

But they're not going away any time soon, and tonight, it looks like they've reorganized their front page, to make the site more of a destination, rather than a conduit for you to get to tag data and ego-inflating blog statistics. Of note, Technorati might have gone the opposite direction, moving the most popular sites off the front page altogether, and instead, to Blogger Central.


The new front page highlights posts from my selected "favorites" as it did before, but displays the content in a more text-rich fashion, as if you were reading RSS in a feed reader. The site also brought forward the "My blogs" section, showing current authority level and my number of fans. (Not all that high, mind you)

Also highlighted is the integration of top tags, with a 30-day graph showing the prominence of those tags over time. The rising blog posts and rising news stories, determined by external links and discussion, has been pushed to the bottom, below that of updates from my favorites.

Will this make me visit Technorati.com that much more? Probably not, unless I were to start using the site to more thoroughly walk the blogosphere and tag my favorites. After all, given I have 240+ RSS feeds, and I'm only a fan of a small handful of sites on Technorati, I haven't been keeping up. But at least it shows the company is trying something new in another attempt to make traffic stick.

See Also:
Technorati: Totally Toast In Tracking Real-Time Traction?
Technorati Fights Off Irrelevance With Return of Charts
Technorati Down Again, Google Sure to Benefit