Technorati

This is pretty funny. I tried to register with my favorite user name (richmond) and it said someone beat me to it. Argh. Just on a whim I tried to log in with a couple of my passwords, and voila! The door opens. Sad or funny? I dunno.

Technorati and its ilk may have started out being all about discovery and popularity, but the elephant in the room today is MONEY. As blogging has grown, mainstream media has turned from scorn and dismissal to investment and co-option. Advertising money is flowing by the billions out of print and classifieds into online. Measuring metrics, in turn, is big bucks. Recent IPO (up 60% in the past month... Bubble 2.0 anyone?) ComScore, for instance, is competing against traditional companies like Nielsen to measure traffic. And now, it seems, mainline media companies are trying to buy the flow from blogs - they don't want to host the blog, but they are paying blog authors to give their flow statstics to the conglomerate.

Technorati was an early player, and theoretically it should be in the middle of this frenzy, but its buzz these days is terrible. Users are upset with changes in their focus from ranking to discoverability. They are upset with how long it takes Technorati to see changes and new links. When I go there it mostly looks like spam. The top searches right now:

1. gambar autopsi
2. jaiku
3. nurin jazlin
4. eva herman
5. gambar autopsi nurin
6. radiohead
7. nurin
8. in rainbows
9. gambar mayat nurin jazlin jazimin
10. gambar autopsi nurin jazlin
11. ron paul
12. gambar mayat nurin jazlin
13. mayat nurin jazlin
14. gambar bedah siasat nurin jazlin
15. noelia

Huh? The "Top 100" isn't much better - the #11 website in the world, according to Technorati, is icanhascheezburger.com ! (@#*$&#!)

Technorati probably was the best thing going two years ago when the original Library 2.0 program was set up. It looks like the world has moved on.