Technorati To Start Competing with Bloggers

Technorati, once the leading place to find interesting blogs ranked by popularity and sorted by topic, has lacked a cohesive strategy over recent years. From a spin-off video show to a recent nod to Twitter’s popularity, the ideas have continued to trickle in but show no overarching vision. The launch of a blog ad network seems to be the only strategic move from a company that could have owned the real-time search space before Twitter. It’s shocking, in fact, that the place everyone used to visit for realtime results – long before Google got into blog search – isn’t even a player in this new realtime era.

Now Technorati has a new tact: hiring bloggers. The company wants to start creating original content of its own, writes TheNextWeb, which discovered this email sent to a number of bloggers yesterday:

Become a Technorati Writer!

Technorati is entering into the next phase of our evolution: original content.

Beginning in October, Technorati will feature original content on the site written by bloggers just like you! This is an amazing opportunity to give your writing vast exposure, become known as an expert in your field/s of interest, and to join a vibrant writer community.

Get in on the ground floor by signing up via the Technorati Contact Page.

Select the “New: Technorati Writer Signup” option from the “Message Type” drop-down box.

You will receive information and writing instructions as we get closer to launch date.

We very much look forward to working with you!

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Missed Opportunities

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Does Technorati want to become the next About.com? The next AssociatedContent? Whatever the inspiration, there can be only one reason for Technorati’s pursuit of original content: Google. Search engines lap up original content, and with Google already counting 60,400+ links pointing to the Technorati domain, the site could rank highly for all sorts of fresh content. If Technorati can produce even semi-readable articles, it could see a linear increase in traffic over time.

That’s not to say it’s a good idea: quite the opposite. Technorati was, for a brief spell, one of the few search engines that performed better than Google for a specific task – discovering what blogs were saying right now, not in hours or days when Google finally indexed the content. There was a time when blog search was synonymous was Technorati: it was doing realtime search before we even called it that. And now Technorati wants to be a humble blog: a safe decision, perhaps, but one seriously lacking in ambition.

Image Credit: Tara Hunt, Flickr

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Reviews: Flickr, Google, Twitter
Tags: technorati

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