Techmeme Leaderboard To Launch, Attacking Technorati's Last Stronghold
Blog search engine Technorati's founding CEO is gone, its traffic party has ended and its core search functionality is under long term fire from competitors like Google Blog Search, Ask.com and Sphere (among others).
Context & Ripple Effects
Technorati spent early 2007 weighing its future: Read/WriteWeb framed its opportunities and exit options in March, just before its Technorati 100 remained the blogosphere's de facto influence ranking. By October the picture had darkened — the founding CEO was gone, traffic growth had stalled, and core blog search faced long-term competition from Google Blog Search, Ask.com and Sphere.
TechCrunch's framing is that ranking blogs was the one franchise left standing, which is what makes the launch of Techmeme's own Leaderboard on October 1 an attack rather than an addition: the same day, the Leaderboard went live, putting an algorithmic, headline-driven rival index next to a link-based incumbent.
First-order effects
- Bloggers chasing visibility now have two competing ladders — Technorati's link-authority list and Techmeme's traffic-driven Leaderboard — splitting the attention economy that Technorati's rankings used to monopolize.
- Advertisers and PR buyers who priced placements off Technorati authority gain a second influence metric, undercutting Technorati's last differentiated product at the moment its search business is squeezed by Google Blog Search, Ask.com and Sphere.
Second-order effects
- With its ranking stronghold contested, Technorati's previously discussed exit options narrow: acquirers were valuing the audience and the index together, and a credible challenger to the index erodes both.
- The other search rivals benefit without moving — every blogger optimizing for Techmeme's list is a user whose link-and-tag behavior feeds less into Technorati's authority data, compounding the competitive pressure from Google Blog Search and Sphere.
Third-order effects
- If curation-driven leaderboards prove they can rank the blogosphere without link-counting infrastructure, influence measurement shifts from who-maintains-the-index toward whoever captures reader attention directly — a structural threat to standalone blog search engines as a category.
The trend: Blogosphere gatekeeping is shifting from link-counting indexes like Technorati to attention-driven aggregators like Techmeme, with ranking lists as the contested prize.