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.”

There’s barrelfuls of chatter to spare today stemming from the announcement that David Sifry is stepping down as CEO of Technorati, and that the blog search engine/portal is laying off eight employees. That, coupled with news that PodTech CEO John Furrier is stepping down is causing speculation about where the web 2.0 cycle is at – pre-pop, popping, or pop-as-overhyped. Jason Calacanis does a good job of framing the last three “down-and-up” cycles, 2005-2007 being a largely up-up-and-away period.

Mike Arrington’s characterization of Sifry’s goodbye message is pretty hilarious:

me….me…me…and oh yeah we layed off eight people.

Sifry also refers to himself as a “great leader” in the fourth paragraph of his post.

Mathew Ingram concurs, writing that “he certainly seems to have gotten the hang of the cold-blooded CEO dismissal message.”

What I’m hoping is that the Internet economy will see a soft landing over the next year, with an inevitable shakeout in oversaturated spaces, and with continued growth in companies that provide value for people. A lot may ride on the overall health of the advertising industry, although as we’re seeing, the trend in ad spending is moving rapidly away from traditional media and toward the online world.

David Dalka looks at a potentially post-Technorati landscape and runs down other blog search engines, such as Ask, Google, and Icerocket. My personal take is that there is yet to be the “Google” of the blog search market (and that includes Google blog search!). Technorati is actually just about the best at present, and I like the introduction of its “authority” system, though how it works is somewhat mysterious to me.

BlogStorm and a bunch of others point out that Technorati’s troubles have accelerated as Google has been eating away at its traffic. Mark Evans makes the interesting counter-argument that while Technorati’s traffic and revenue growth has been “solid… it’s simply not sexy to potential suitors.”

Blog search engine Technorati has rolled out a new front page design in an attempt to further align itself as a multi-functional blog and media portal. The new design has cleaned up what was a somewhat chaotic-looking homepage, creating a more eyeball-pleasing experience. It includes a news ticker that runs across the top of the site that runs popular tags.

And as Dave Sifry explains, Technorati wants to leverage its blog search engine to become the premiere place to find “user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more. They want all the good stuff out there, all in real-time, and we’re using the power of 80 million bloggers to help organize it and make it fun to browse; using the wisdom of crowds as a mirror on ourselves.”

Andy Beal trumpets the changes in declaring that the New Technorati is the Google of Social Media.

Steve Rubel brings up some great broader points about the need to easily be able to find web “influencers” across a broad spectrum of the Internet. Who is influencing the conversation on Facebook, he asks, and what videos are buzzing up buzz on YouTube? It seems that Technorati is attempting to move in the direction of answering those questions, and if it can it may be able to move up the ranks into Google territory.

Speaking of Google, they recently unveiled (what I believe is a revamped) Google Trends, brought to us by Google Labs. Search for American Idol for example and you’ll see a fascinating trend line that shows huge spikes in Google search volume surrounding climactic episodes of the show.

So the hunt to track online influence continues.

A great deal seems to be made of Dave Sifry’s most recent State of the Live Web report, which shows among other things that while the overall number of blogs continues to rise, the number of active blogs (defined as having been updated within the last 90 days) seems to be rather stable, sitting in the 15 million range.

Valleywag asks: “why do you think the number of active bloggers is flat?” BusinessWeek’s Heather Green states succinctly that blogging “might not be for everyone.” She also goes on to note an opinion now held by many, that most people who are interested in blogging are already doing it, with others moving on to such activities as social networking and podcasting.

I see this trend as the continued maturation of the blogosphere. There is always more “room” for a high quality, engaging, and compelling blog to find an audience.

That’s why I’m a little puzzled by comments by those such as Andy Beal, who writes that the future of the blogosphere is “not quite as bright as we all thought.”

Mark Evans takes Heather Green’s analysis by writing: “Not sure if this is a trend or a break in the action but it does put the spotlight on the reality that while setting up a blog is easy, writing one is difficult after the initial enthusiasm dies off.” Evans goes on to note that the money part is significant, that those who think they will retire after blogging for a few months are almost universally disappointed.

Blogging Is Not A Minority Sport

The Grind and Crunch of Blog Production

I take issue with a piece that Victor Keegan of the UK’s Guardian Unlimited wrote today, called To the average Joe, blogs aren’t cutting it.

Keegan’s argument boils down to a few main points. Let’s take a look at them:

* Blogging is “very much a minority sport” because, according to the recent State of Technorati report, the blogosphere has doubled in size, from 35 million blogs to 70 million, in the last 320 days.

Keegan argues that because English-language blogs now number in the 24 million range, that is a sign that the blogosphere is waning in influence as compared to the proliferation of video uploading/sharing and social networking.

I find this assertion to be incorrect in several ways. The fact that non-English language blogs now make up the majority of the blogosphere is astounding, and means that there’s a galaxy of conversations and developments going on that we in the West are largely unaware of. I would think that this part of the web will only continue to grow and develop.

Also, doubling in size to 70 million blogs in less than a year is an enormous increase, particularly when considering that writing a blog with any regularity is hard. Just as most people who start a novel never finish, most blogs are abandoned in less than a year, and many don’t make it past a few posts. I would think that now that blogs have been around for a decade, people consider this difficulty before taking the plunge. I’d love to see numbers on current activity of blogs founded within the last few years as compared to an earlier period.

* Despite success “in politics and the arts,” blogging hasn’t “taken off” in a way people thought it would.

I don’t understand the rationale behind this assertion. In size and in quality, the blogosphere is big and bad and thriving. Blogging and online media are fundamentally rocking traditional media to its very core. Online mainstream media publications are implementing blogs into their offerings, professional journalists and CEOs and well known public figures are blogging as never before, bringing the public closer to the action and inviting them to partake in the conversation.

“Blogging” is now mainstream, and the blogosphere is maturing. That maturity is reflected in both the sheer growth in the number of blogs as well as the innumerable ways that blogs are shaping the Internet… and even in the ways that it is shaping such things as social networking and other “web 2.0″ applications.

The “new black” in blogging, for instance, is “micro blogging,” proven out by Twitter, the latest craze, and other services like JaikuL and Tumblr.

People are finding ways to communicate and share information, and blogs are an essential component in that.

The Media Age rightly points out that blogging “is absolutely a losing business proposition” because of the time required to do it, and to do it right. I would argue though that most do it not for money but for the passion of sharing information and ideas and engaging readers in conversation. And in fact those with the most passion for this have the best shot at cranking out a winning business proposition.

* “… the act of blogging is turning out to be more of a spectator sport than we originally thought.”

Hilarizor! The argument used to be that no one read blogs because all blog readers were too busy writing and hawking their own blogs. A growing non-writing reader base for blogs – any blogger will tell you this – is a gorgeous, gorgeous thing.

The blogosphere is maturing and continuing to expand at a strong if not astronomical rate. More important than sheer numbers though is that blogs continue to have a profound influence on the online media world and among other innovations is increasingly becoming integrated with more traditional media offerings.

Far being a minority sport, the blogosphere is big time big leagues.