Many of the readers of this blog will know that I have been working for months on getting Technorati to respond to at least one of my many tickets.
My question was -- why are there four separate URLs listed for my blog? The answer was partly with my tool, I had not completed the domain name mapping. Ah! Hint, my real domain name links are at the top of the list with possible additions for when my posts linked to a TypePad URL, the two listed at the bottom. At some point I think I had 656 cumulative links (don't ask).
The topic of this post is not that. It's possible that Technorati might have bitten more than it could chew. As detailed in a recent article at Forbes.com,
Blog search-engine startup Technorati's own technorati, including its chief technologist Tantek Celik--an ex-Microsoft computer scientist known for groundbreaking work in defining Web standards--and vice president of engineering Adam Hertz, are leaving.
Will the company survive? Sure. But it will need to change if it is to flourish.
Downtime and performance issues for the site have not helped. But more serious issues may be due to Google preferring direct traffic from content on articles than from searches of that content on Technorati.
As stated in the article, the site is trying simultaneously to reach publishers and consumers of user generated content—a broad mission. The article concludes that the focus of a reinvented company might be less as search engine and more as data hoarder. I think focus is good. The only use I make of this tool is as a reference tool to see who is linking to me so I can thank them and launch deeper conversations. I suspect many of us use it that way.
What do you think? Should the company's focus change? How do you use Technorati, if at all?