Comments on: Technorati: where’s the innovation?

By: One by One « ‘Cross The Breeze

One by One « ‘Cross The Breeze — Thu, 22 Nov 2007 15:10:41 +0000

[...] is that I’ve become more fascinated about the concept of influence and hence wrote about that quite a lot. I’m working on a little project right now that should provide some more information [...]

By: engtech

engtech — Fri, 31 Aug 2007 21:44:33 +0000

I don’t know. I’ve just given up on them. http://internetducttape.com/2007/05/24/quitting-technorati/

They’re really more of a marketing company who gets blogs to link to them than anything else. How much value do you get from Technorati in terms of the number of times they expect you to link to them with tags, favorites, etc.

By: Read what matters « ‘Cross The Breeze

Read what matters « ‘Cross The Breeze — Wed, 22 Aug 2007 10:55:23 +0000

[...] del.icio.us, Digg, Technorati, … on the interaction for that post. This is something that I suggested to Technorati a few weeks ago so I obviously like that as [...]

By: Kris Hoet

Kris Hoet — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 19:47:50 +0000

Hey Derek – Don’t mind the ‘delay’. I know it can take time to track & respond from time to time and I’m already happy that you’ve taken the time to do this. I’ve emailed Technorati 2 or 3 times in the past without ever getting an answer so this is good :)

It’s also great to see improvements are under way and that they are in line with some of the suggestions made. I agree with you that you should be proud with what you’ve done so far and that you should keep pushing to make it better all the time as well.

So thanks for the reply and I’m looking forward to see the upcoming initiatives.

By: Derek Gordon

Derek Gordon — Sun, 05 Aug 2007 15:17:35 +0000

Sorry for the delay in responding here — my co-workers and I do try to keep up with blog posts concerning Technorati and to offer responses whenever we’re able, but it’s a big blogosphere! And thanks for taking time to write such a well thought-out post concerning our service. Your suggestions are great ones and I’ve shared them with everyone at the office. We are about 40 people today and track something like 94 million blogs worldwide. We also track something like 300 million other tagged social media objects (photos, videos, podcasts, etc.) at any given moment. And we’re clear: our service isn’t perfect. (We’re also clear that we’re proud of what we’ve achieved so far.) We have some initiatives underway now to address a number of your suggestions, and I know that we have the right people (and funding / revenues) to deliver on your calls for continuing innovation. While we have no specific plans for introducing premium services for publishers for which we charge a fee, we do have plans to greatly improve the ways in which we serve bloggers, and many of those plans are concordant with your suggestions here. We’ll be posting to the Technorati blog about this work in more detail over the coming weeks.

By: Kris Hoet

Kris Hoet — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 22:48:27 +0000

Thanks for the comment David. Resources might well be part of the problem indeed, funding maybe. They have to be aware though (as I believe they’re smart people – although I never met them) that you can ride the same wave forever. As I said before, I want Technorati to be great, that’s probably also why I wrote this post. If that wasn’t the case, I would even bother. But things will have to start changing I think.

And the Mustang, you got to love a great classic car like that ;)

By: Pietel

Pietel — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 15:37:14 +0000

Technorati became well know the last years and is intensively used. Therefore I feel it’s being slow these days.

The web has continued to grow and UGC is much more than blogs. The original strenght of technorati is a bit lost.

I am looking myself for customisable search engines you can subscribe to by RSS for commercial tracking purposes. Not an easy job. Many startups promise a lot, but few really work.

By: David Brain

David Brain — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 13:53:31 +0000

Great suggestions. It is odd that they have not moved much. We (Edelman) did some work with them last year in Europe and they were frighteningly thin on the ground in terms of people. I wonder of they have funding to pursue all this work? Personally I found Dave Sifry (who I met once) and Peter Hirshberg (who I travelled around Europe with) two brilliant and committed individuals. Perhaps their next big thing is just round the corner. By the way, Mustangs?

By: Kris Hoet

Kris Hoet — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 10:47:51 +0000

Thanks Valeria. I don’t think they’ll ever charge for the service, although I do think they have an opportunity to build out the free service and to build a premium (paying) service on top of that. But I don’t expect any innovation whatsoever soon really.

By: Valeria Maltoni

Valeria Maltoni — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 10:40:56 +0000

Good suggestions, Kris. Aside from top people leaving, maybe the other issue with any company is that it looks at its services internally and not from a user experience stand point. The funny thing is that ultimately we are all users *and* internal people (at some company, even if its our own). So how do we bridge the gap in consciousness? Let users give us suggestions and weigh those with our experience may be one solution.

Not listening — as in not responding to emails and queries when they challenge our system — is not the answer I’m afraid. Yet, until such service is free, we’re almost not able to influence those decisions. So will Technorati’s answer be to charge?