Technorati: Feature bloat alert
Technorati has announced a new Blog Finder feature. You’re probably familiar with the way that Technorati offers a list of blogs that have posts marked with a particular ‘Tag’ (if you’re not, click one of the tags on this post as an example), ordered by how recent the posts are.
Now, you can discard that post-specificness and relevance and just search for blogs that are marked with a particular tag. You don’t know what the actual posts will be about, or even if there ARE any (unlike normal tags, these ones aren’t tied to posts in any way), and what specifically the posts are about. For example, if you went to the ‘Games’ tag page, you would get a short excerpt of each post so that you could find the specific content you were looking for, even if the posts weren’t tagged very specifically.
The blog tracker also worsens some inherent flaws with the whole tagging concept, by making your choice of variation on a particular tag (e.g. using ‘Computers and Internet’ or separate ‘Computers’ and ‘Internet’ tags) as Josh Hallet explains:
The initial version of the listings was built by using category and tag data that blogs had already submitted. Right out of the box, the lists are very BETA. For example, some bloggers use the category ‘PR’ instead of ‘Public Relations’. As such, Neville Hobson’s blog is listed as the Most Authorative blog on ‘PR’ but is nowhere to be found on the list for ‘Public Relations’ blogs. This blog is listed as the 11th Most Authorative Blog for ‘Public Relations’ and ‘PR’. Jeremy Pepper would get a kick out of this since he and I have talked about the fact that I’m not really a true PR blogger
I am also listed as the Most Authorative blog for ‘Orlando’ even though I rarely write about Orlando. Why? I guess becuase I have tagged more posts Orlando than other bloggers.
All considered, a wonderful, totally necessary new feature from technorati that will dramatically improve blogging for authors and readers (sic).