How I use Technorati

Pete asked the following question on Mashable tonight, "Question: What Should Technorati Do?" He points to an article in Forbes Magazine in which Rachel Rosmarin notes, "Blog search-engine startup Technorati's own technorati, including its chief technologist and vice president of engineering, are leaving. With these heavy-hitters will go some of the site's geek credibility." I agree with Rachel as I believe Tantek was the face to the developer community and he had great respect from most Web conference attendees.

I thought I would share the two ways I use Technorati: checking inbound links and researching articles on sites I follow. I check Technorati for inbound links on the articles I write daily (ok hourly). I try my best to join the discussions on the sites that link to my articles. I enjoy watching how people react to what I write and learning from the posts. Trackbacks used to work but I find that fewer sites send and accept trackbacks these days.

The other way I use Technorati is for research on sites I follow. Let me illustrate an example. Pete authored an article titled, "Backfence Closes, Citizen Journalism a Failure" earlier this week. I read the article and then clicked over to Technorati to see who linked to the article. Currently there are 14 links to his article. From there, I can visit the sites that interest me, join the conversation and also potentially contact the site to see if they have heard of CN. It's a great blog-to-blog networking tool. I can also follow what the reaction is to Pete's post. Is there any feedback I can learn from? I consider this aspect to be a great research and learning tool.

Pete notes, "There are many directions Technorati could move in: towards MyBlogLog, towards Digg, becoming a media portal and so on. But all seem like me-too attempts that are destined to fail. Most likely we’ll see an acquisition at this juncture." I agree that these ideas have the failure stamp on them. My take would be for Technorati to move into "authority ranking and buzz metrics" similar to what BuzzLogic (CN interview) is doing in this space. Technorati already does a great job of tracking links across the Web, now put those links to a better use than just "Authority" rankings. I won't even go into my thoughts about the joke that Authority is here, I will save that for another post.

I would suggest that Technorati leave the search engine piece behind. Focus on helping companies (and bloggers/web sites) track and measure buzz. This is where the real money is. They could sell various plans for cash instead of relying on advertisements as well. Check out our previous Technorati coverage.