Authority

Yesterday I noticed – like many others I guess – that Technorati updated it’s ranking a little bit. We were used to see ‘x number of links from y number of blogs’ but this is no more, instead we have something new: ‘authority’. I first figured that it probably had some fancy new algorithm to measure this, but no, it’s just the number of blogs linking in. So instead of ‘x links by y blogs’ we just get the ‘by y blogs’ feature but it got a fancier name.

A few thoughts on this. First of all I’m not sure if this will make things more transparant, I doubt it. The way it was presented initially was pretty clear, which is not the case anymore. Especially for newcomers I don’t think that will help. My second thought was that this is a missed opportunity for Technorati. By developing a new ‘authority’ feature, they could have done some great work in creating a standard for measuring influence, making their service more important again. Now that regular blogsearch engines like Google Blogsearch, Icerocket and others are closing in that would differentiate them again. But no.

Think about how they could have created a measurement of ‘authority’ using blogs linking in using the second degree as well (so also the blogs linking into the blogs that link to you). How they could use the tagging to even measure ‘authority’ per category, they have frequence and most of the information needed to create a real sence of authority and influence. Too bad they didn’t, as said a missed opportunity for Technorati if you ask me.

I also wonder how much of this was asked for by Technorati’s users? Was this what you and I were waiting for? The mobile feature I wrote about earlier is pretty nice, but apart from that do you remember any update that you were waiting for? I don’t. I do remember I sent them an email once, asking why there was no way to merge 2 url’s together on one profile since they both pointed to the same blog. That is many months ago and I’m still waiting on a reply.