Technorati 100: What's Hot in the Blogosphere
Written by Alex Iskold and edited by Richard MacManus — Earlier this week Emre wrote about declining traffic on Technorati and considered the exit options for this blog vertical search and portal site. The challenge from Google Blogsearch is certainly serious.
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece is Read/WriteWeb's follow-up to Emre's examination of Technorati's exit options earlier the same week, and it lands at a real inflection point: a HitWise report cited days earlier showed Google Blogsearch passing Technorati in blog search traffic for the first time. The Technorati 100 — the blogosphere's de facto authority index — is now published by a company whose core search function is visibly losing its market.
The stakes go beyond traffic charts. Since its 2002 launch Technorati built its identity on tracking the blogosphere, with RSS-based topic tracking and periodic State of the Blogosphere reports serving as the reference layer for who matters in blogging. A rankings list from a declining tracker is a weaker currency for the bloggers it ranks and the advertisers who buy against it.
First-order effects
- Technorati's flagship authority product, the Technorati 100, is now carried by a site that HitWise data shows trailing Google Blogsearch in blog search traffic — undermining the list's claim to measure the blogosphere.
Second-order effects
- Bloggers and advertisers who treat the top-100 as a visibility and pricing benchmark face pressure to hedge toward Google Blogsearch's rankings, accelerating the traffic decline the HitWise data captures.
Third-order effects
- If general-purpose search keeps absorbing blog discovery, vertical search players lose their role as the blogosphere's ranking infrastructure, leaving authority measurement to whoever owns the broader search index.
The trend: General-purpose search engines are displacing specialist vertical services as the discovery and authority-ranking layer for blogs.