Edelman And Technorati Generate Great Publicity Together, But Invest In Wrong Functionality

More than a dozen folks have asked me what I think of what one executive called “the Edelman and Technorati service to track blogs” featured in the NY Times yesterday. In a nutshell, here’s what I think: Great publicity. I am envious of the nice story they generated in my favorite newspaper, and I congratulate them for their efforts.

Having said that, I don’t believe there is a lot of substance here. Technorati has been around for a couple years, and we have a lot of experience using it to search and monitor blogs for some major brands. We use Technorati for a number of reasons. It is simple to use. It uses a really simple algorithm to calculate a blog’s authority — the number of other sites that link to it — and provides a down-and-dirty feel for who is influential. You can search in about 20 languages today. The results are better than other search options. There are a lot of cool ways to use Technorati, but most clients leave the fun stuff to us. Technorati is free. All in all, we really like the service.

Edelman says they are sponsoring development of new Technorati sites in French, German, Italian, Korean and Chinese, involving an “investment of several hundred thousand dollars….” Since Technorati already allows searching and monitoring blogs in these languages, it sound like Edelman is working with Technorati to create local language user interfaces. This will be nice for non-English speaking users who have a difficult time using Technorati’s English interface.

While it’s a really great service, Technorati does have some shortcomings. Selfishly speaking for GCI and our clients, we wish Technorati would invest “several hundred thousand dollars” in a few other areas, such as:

1. Developing a more dependable approach to measuring authority and influence. The number of sites that link to a blog (or inbound links) simply does not cut it. By Technorati (and Edelman’s) definition, one of the most linked to and, thus, authoritative European bloggers is Beppe Grillo, an Italian comedian. If Mr. Grillo mentions “New York Yankees” in a post does that make him an authority on the team? I don’t think so… An Italian blogger with only 10% of Beppe Grillo’s links who writes exclusively about “American baseball” would have more authority, in my view. We wish Technorati would incorporate variables to measure relevance and occurrence into its formula.
2. Including forums and wiki’s in search results. There are some important discussions going on in Internet forums. Forums are more difficult to search and monitor, and we wish Technorati would include them in their results. The current forum search tools are almost useless.
3. Eliminating spam. There is a TON of spam in Technorati search results. That makes large-scale search and monitoring inefficient and manually intensive.
4. Ensuring consistent up-time and quality search results. Our monitoring team tells me Technorati has been “down for days.” Apparently, the search results end at page 50 and then just repeat themselves. For one of our often mentioned clients, page 50 represents posts from the previous 20 hours. That means we’re missing about four hours. The average user will never realize this, but since we use Technorati extensively we do and it’s a problem.

The other issue with using Technorati to search and monitor the blogosphere is it is a heavy manual process. Manual processes are difficult to scale and distribute. This may not be an issue for small and medium size businesses, but it will be for large, global enterprises that are monitoring a lot of posts in multiple languages.
There are a number of new companies showing up with potential solutions for large enterprise. Take a look at Visible Technologies’ TruCast (a WPP portfolio company) and BuzzLogic, for instance. We will be beta testing some of these solutions in the coming months, and we will let you know what we learn.

17 October 2006 | Monitoring, Search, Tools | Comments