Online Media Cultist

Blog search engine and aspiring social media portal Technorati has had some well publicized troubles of late, including the resignation of CEO David Sifry and a round of layoffs.

In an effort to turn the page, perhaps, and to stay relevant in the rapidly evolving social media aggregation and search game, Technorati has announced the introduction of Technorati Topics, which is designed to “help you discover what bloggers are writing about in Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life.”

I’m most reminded of Digg Spy when looking at Technorati Topics, as new stories refresh in real time, “bubbling up” to the top every few seconds as the page refreshes under various subject headings. Therefore, I believe that the popularity of this feature will be limited. In other words, it’s mildly interesting to see new stories “bubble up” in real time on your browser, but in most cases it’s easier to turn to, let’s say, the front page of Digg to see what that community has voted to the top, or top-of-the-fold stories on Techmeme to see what the hot tech stories are and the cluster of conversations surrounding them.

It doesn’t help that the process of how Technorati Topics stories are selected is somewhat mysterious: “We considered a number of factors to get the seed list of blogs including Technorati Authority, frequency of posting, use of relevant tags, links to related subject matter and general topicality.”

One of my longstanding “rules” about web usability is this: people need to know “why I’m here” within a few seconds or the entire game is lost, you’ve lost your audience. For example, my hope is that the title Online Media Cultist at the top of the page will quickly convey that this blog publication is going to tend to be about webby and online media-related stuff.

In terms of news stories on the web, you basically get three main varieties: new, popular, and “important” (front page New York Times stories are important because its editors are telling you they’re important). Technorati Topics doesn’t cleanly fit into any of these areas, which therefore unfortunately fails this basic usability test.

In other words, I asked myself, “why am I here?” and I wasn’t sure. Is Technorati Topics supposed to be about the newest stories, the breaking stories, the most talked about and linked to stories? It’s frustratingly unclear.

Mathew Ingram calls out Technorati’s other recent offering, Technorati WTF, as a ghost town and isn’t very optimistic about Technorati Topic’s ability to transcend past the status of undead. The usually measured Ingram breaks character to exclaim, “What the heck is this company thinking? They have no CEO, their database comes under fire repeatedly for its lack of reliability, and this is the best they can do?”

There’s lots of blogospheric agreement about this general sentiment:

* Frantic Industries: “Technorati Topics Throws a Bunch of Random Posts At You”

* Mashable: “Technorati Launches Useless ‘Topics’ Section”

* Read/Write Web: “Unfortunately, Technorati’s scroll of news moves so fast it defies usefulness.”

* Webware: “In my opinion, Technorati Topics comes up short, while Techmeme succeeds, simply because of the way that the stories are displayed.”