Technorati Authority and Rank
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.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is a small interface change with a long backstory: critics had spent over a year poking at how opaque Technorati's metrics were — A VC's 2006 post on Technorati Confusion being the sharpest example — while the company itself had been running an explicit usability push since the end of 2005 (Making Technorati easier to use). Replacing two phrasings of raw inbound-link counts with one Authority number is the visible product answer to both.
It also matters for ranking: with a single canonical number on every blog listing, Technorati is consolidating what feeds lists like the Technorati 100 into one legible currency, just as observers were weighing the company's strategic options in spring 2007.
First-order effects
- Bloggers and searchers see one Authority figure instead of 'N blogs link here' and 'X links from Y blogs' on the Blog page and in results — fewer ways to misread the data, but less granular information per listing.
Second-order effects
- Marketers and PR folks who used raw link counts to size up blogs must recalibrate around Authority, making it the de facto unit of blog influence measurement.
Third-order effects
- If one number becomes the industry's shared yardstick, blog ranking consolidates around whatever Technorati defines Authority to be — raising the stakes on its methodology and inviting competitors or standards efforts to challenge it.
The trend: Blog search is standardizing diffuse link data into single authority scores, turning influence measurement into a product feature rather than a raw statistic.