Technorati may be lacking as aggregator tool for lawyers

Lawyers and law firms receiving feeds of posts mentioning keywords and key phrases from aggregators such as Technorati, PubSub, Newsgator and Bloglines are light years ahead of those who have chosen to ignore the Internet discussion.

The question is with all the aggregators out there, which one to use. Technorati has been all the buzz over the last couple years and just recently redid the site with a new user interface. The problem is that Technorati always seemed lacking to me. It seemed to be missing posts that included my selected keywords and key phrases. In addition, the feeds of posts from Tecnorati always seemed delayed. Rather than blog about the problem, I just switched to Newsgator and did not rely on Technorati any longer.

Jeremy Wright, more of an expert on blogs and RSS than I, has also left Technorati behind and posted why.

Over the last 6 months, Technorati’s accuracy has been going downhill, its ability to get new posts in the index has been going downhill and its ability to keep an index clean has been going downhill. The net result is that when I search for Ensight (Jeremy’s blog) links, I’m lucky to get 4-5 new ones on a given week, even though every other search engine reports 20-30 new ones just about every week.

So, what’s a body to do?

Why, use an oft-forgotten feature of Bloglines (where I also read blogs, btw) called ‘Citations’. This feature used to be crap, but at some point in the last year it’s actually become useful.

I just add ‘ensight.org’ to the URL ‘http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=’, and I get all kinds of great results. Not as many as PubSub offers up, but certainly better than Technorati.

So, goodbye Technorati. You helped the blogosphere grow, but I guess we got too big too fast, and you just haven’t been able to keep up.

Jeremy is no light weight on the blogosphere. Expect his critique to generate discussion from numerous blog publishers and a response from Technorati.