Technorati blog ranking : Gltiz over substance
Technorati’s changes of last week are more glitz than substance.
In addition to minor cosmetic changes, bloggers are now ranked by authority. Best I can tell, there is no ranking system change, we’re now ranked by total of incoming links, i.e., 350, as opposed to 7,500, the previous position we’d hold in blog rank if we had 350 incoming links.
Shel Israel nails why Technorati’s continuing push of the top rated bloggers is misguided. Authority for a blogger should be measured by influence within their target audience.
I could be a political blogger, and have only three readers and no links. Technorati could see I was a garbage pail with no authority. What if my three readers were the president of the United States, the president of Russia and the premier of China. Zero authority? If I could influence them to move toward world peace, I’d be the first Nobel Blogger.
…Relevance is different than blogging.
What is relevant to you or your company is different than what is relevant to me or my company. Last time I checked, Technorati said I was a more popular blogger than my friend and erstwhile client, Pat Phelan. But if you are interested in VOIP or low-cost telephony, I would wager that Pat has at least ten times my authority on those subjects and well he should. Technorati has no way of understanding topical relevance other than through tags and has no way to measure that pat is more relevant to some subjects than I could dream of being.
As Shel says, being on the A-list of bloggers may be important in isolated cases. For a company looking to make business development deals, getting popular fast can be a plus. If advertising is the sole means of supporting yourself, being popular is good. But for the 99.99% rest of us, influence within our target audience is the key.
Technorati’s served a great purpose in aggregating blog feeds and making blog searches available by RSS feed. The blogosphere would be years behind without Technorati and its founder David Sifry. But for most bloggers, Technorati’s blog ranking is a might gimmicky.