While it is often said, if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all, Technorati’s new business plan cries out for a critique. Once the Mecca of blogging enthusiasts across the net, systemic changes to social media site Technorati’s mission has inexorably altered the role it will play in the blogosphere.
Technorati was once the place where a new blog could get listed, have its feeds pulled, and have a chance at developing an audience. In addition, links to the blog site would be listed, building what Technorati called “authority” on its pages. It was a level playing field for all bloggers.
Now Technorati has rolled out a new game plan, one of which new blogs are definitely not a part despite Technorati’s glowing description of the new roll out. Gone is the option to “ping” your content to show up on Technorati’s feed. RSS feeds exist for only those blogs with larger authority. And in the new rollout, many blogs with established authority found those numbers disappeared from their listing. If you score low on authority your content will be pinged every month or so from Technorati itself. Where once links has a shelf life of six months on Technorati for authority scoring purposes, now the shelf life is a single month. In a business where blogs can be birthed and wither within that time frame from a lack of readership, Technorati will hardly be helpful to a new blogger and present bloggers with smaller authority are not being served as well. The only blogs that continue benefit from being listed on Technorati are established blogs with an authority ranking above 100.
As new bloggers look for options in building readership, Technorati might just find itself not just in the cold, but frozen out of dynamic new offerings by the narrowing of their vision.
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Beth Turnage authors Astrology Explored as well as being publisher of Astrology Media Press. Beth is available for private consultations. You can contact Beth at starrynightastro@aol.com.
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I do think that astrobloggers need to rely more on networking within the community rather than relying on these mega blog directories.
I agree that we need to network more, but I wonder if that is enough. Certainly I’ve had good results with Networked Blogs on Facebook, and Twitter helps. I think there is a place for directories, but if you count on them for building readership solely through them, that would be a mistake.
I hadn’t visited technorati for a while, and I stopped by there recently to read their latest state of the blogosphere report, and I was wondering what happened to them. It seemed like everything had changed for some reason. Thanks for writing this overview, as it helped to explain some of the changes that I had noticed. I agree that Technorati may make itself obsolete with this new approach. Its a shame too, since only a couple of years ago it was a very important site for a blogger.
Hi Chris,
Thanks for dropping by and weighing in on this. Technorati staffers have been complaining for a long time that “they are small company” and judging by the their response time on users complaints that appears to be the case. Maybe this is their way of stream lining the work load. Maybe they are thinking they really are doing a better job. Who knows?
I am surprised there isn’t more blowblack for all these changes which makes them more of a static aggregator than a growing community of bloggers.
And maybe its about Pluto in Capricorn.