Technorati Authority the Authority?

It’s been a couple weeks since I’ve logged into Technorati to examine what they think of this blog. To be honest, I’ve come close to giving up on Technorati. A few years ago I realized that their window into the blogosphere was schizophrenic at best. At the time, it revolved around scaling issues as Technorati seemed to be continually unavailable or at least perpetually slow. That changed, props to them. It had to or they were going to die a slow agonizing death that made everyone else suffer. They made some other improvements along the way too by enhancing their user interface, introducing new features (such as WTF - I know their endgame is to be ranked #1 in Google for WTF - by my estimate, they are at #5 which is not bad for an acronym that means something completely different!).

Still, they are better but they are not there. Technorati CEO David Sifry puts out his quarterly reports regarding the blogosphere in an effort to cement themselves as the authority. Still, they are not the authority. We are prepared to replace all Technorati data with Google Blog Search data at b5media, for instance, and why would we do such a thing if we believed in Technorati as the authority?!

Today, I logged into Technorati to take a look at this blogs statistics courtesy of Technorati and I noticed a change. They had replaced the verbage that read “884 blogs linked here” with “Technorati Authority: 884″. Fascinating! What are they up to, your intrepid blogger thought as he clicked deeper into that definition. Interestingly, this is an excerpt of the May 4 blog post on the Technorati blog that explains what actually went into this (and by the way, this snippet is courtesy of Clipmarks)

On Fri. May 4th, we updated Technorati.com to include the Technorati Authority for blogs listed on the Blog page and in search results. This update changed the earlier references of “N blogs link here” and “X links from Y blogs” with the single Technorati Authority number. On the blog page, we also show the Technorati Rank.

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.
<snip>
Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the hightest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.

So really, there is no actually change here. The only change is a verbage change that is creatively implemented to make you think theres a change. It’s also conveniently self-important. Your thoughts?

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About the Author: Aaron Brazell is the lead editor of Technosailor.com and a social media expert. His passion is to see companies and individuals use the internet and web technologies wisely and effectively to promote their brands and companies. He is Business Development Manager for Lijit and he worked as Director of Technology at b5media from 2005-2008 and is currently an independent consultant.