The Lowdown On Technorati

The term Technorati, or T’rati as many users refer to, is a blended word of “technology” and “literati”, alluding to the culture of web loggers who speak out on everything and anything via the Internet, or technological intellectuals.

Technorati is the brainchild of Dave Sifry, an open source advocate and founder of LinuxCare and wireless technology software company Sputnik, based in San Francisco, Ca. It is an Intenet search engine for web logs or “blogs” at par with big engines Google, Yahoo and IceRocket. It uses open source software and as April 2007, it has an index of over 75 million weblogs. Increased internet usage has somehow been influenced by Technorati.

The use of tags in weblogs has become very popular, and is an easy way to direct people to a particular site when the right tag and keyword is activated. The tag is essentially a signal such as a keyword that describes the content of a particular post in a web log. It makes it easier to expose the blog site when they are indexed and enables searchers to hook up to the sites relevant to them.

In Technorati, the creation of tags and bypassing handcodings was facilitated with the tools Magical Sheep Technorati tags bookmarklet, Greasemonkey script, and ICE online tag generator prior to the appearance of the built-in New Blogger. The tags in Technorati, which began to be used in 2005, is similar to bookmarking and can be used across systems such as the one used in Flickr or Del.icio.us. There is no listing of tags because any can be used or created at whim; even phrases can be used such as “Flipping Pages”

In the early part of Technorati’s existence, there have been complaints of constant breakdowns in the system and the inability to return satisfactory results quickly. Some problems with Technorati’s feed indexing involves sites whose URLs start with “www”. It also skips old posts which may no longer appear in updated main pages, unlike Google which indexes old webpages. Other bugs and glitches such as dropped tags are being dealt with as they occur. For maximum effectivity of the search on Technorati, web log sites are advised to configure settings to give full feed so search engines such as Technorati can index properly and direct searches to appropriate sites.

One major problem with Technorati is the lack of organization in the tags it uses. Since people are free to make up their own and some people spell words differently, searching can become an exercise in frustration. A mechanism such as the one Google uses for misspelled words, which offered suggestions for correctly spelled keywords, would be helpful. And because there is no limit to the number of tags a site can have, many bloggers use meta-keywords such as “computers” whether it is relevant to the post or not to draw visitors to the site. This makes a search list longer than necessary and relevant entries get lost in the confusion.

Speculation had been rife regarding intentions of Yahoo to purchase Technorati, the Moe in Blogsphere’s Three Stooges. Yahoo had purchased Flickr and Del.icio.us and it would round up the thing nicely with the purchase of Technorati. However, it would also be reasonable if Microsoft would do the buying in order to play catch-up with Yahoo.

But recent developments have been surprising. Instead of being acquired, Technorati did the buying, joining forces with news, entertainment and information collection platform Personal Bee. Both services cater to the technological savvy who prefer to personalize their cyber-experiences. The combination of the search engine and the media platform would provide users more flexibility and customizability of the tagged social media known as Live Web, “democratizing” it as Sifry describes it.

The top position in the company is also up for grabs as head hunter firm James & Company of New York conducts a search for CEO in Silicon Valley. Technorati is in good shape despite the failure of some distribution deals to push through. Considered currently the largest blog engine in the cyberspace and has given Google a run for its money.

The future of the most popular search engine in Blogosphere is not clear as the problems associated with growing pains threaten to erode its subscriber base. However, with the right alliances and effective public relations, the future could be very bright for Technorati.

Internet Usage