The new Technorati

The past few months Technorati really stopped working for me. Hardly any new links back in, at least that they detected. They unveiled a new site recently, you can read about it at TechCrunch. I really hate it, though to be honest I'd stopped using Technorati for a while. It looks like they pruned a lot of blogs, and that might be why I stopped seeing new links. In any case, here's an unrepresentative and personal reason why I really think it's a step back:

The page for Gene Expression at ScienceBlogs (this domain).

The page for Gene Expression at gnxp.com, the original blog I started in the spring of 2002 and still contribute to. I've noticed for a while now that they were downgrading the relevance of this independent site, but they just decided to remove it from their index now.

Looks like Technorati's long tail moment is over.

If you care, the two sites receive comparable traffic, with gnxp.com usually a little ahead over the long term. About half of the total readership of both blogs reads both blogs.

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You may be interested in Ethan Zuckerman's musings on what Technorati has become. To quote him, "In the early years of blogging, the goal [of Technorati] was to convince tech pundits and financial markets that blogging was a real, important and growing phenomenon, so that investing in a blogging search engine sounded like a good idea. Now the goal is convincing advertisers that bloggers are creating highly-targeted, advertiser friendly content." Maybe GNXP classic just isn't advertiser-friendly enough.

lol. you think?

but in any case, moot point. i'll never take ads on GNXP classic anyhow. would slow page load and add clutter.

I used to use it a lot. Now, meh. I can't remember the last time I went there. I do recall that whenever it was the UI had gotten much worse.

Is there any other site that quantifies "authority"? I'm curious to get some measure of how my blog is doing (besdies Analytics).