Sexy Technorati Refresh
May 6th, 07 | 5 remarksHave you been over to Technorati lately? Some nice visual enhancements have recently been made to their interface, as well as some adjustments to the ranking system. The most notable change is the introduction of Authority, along with a Favorites revamp.
Authority has taken the place of the old link count system, and displays how many blogs (within the last 6 months) are linking to you. After 6 months, a link will “drop off”. If a blog links to you more than once, the link is basically “refreshed” for another 6 months, according to the most recent link date.
Rank functions as an indicator of where you are in the scheme of things with regard to your Authority. This is a little confusing at first, but the numbers as they relate to each other work in reverse order. For example, the higher your Authority, the more blogs you have linking to you. The lower your rank, the closer you are to the prestigious Top 100.
Another significant change comes in the form of layout improvements to the user and blog profile pages - boasting sexy gradients, and larger avatars for all of your (now appropriately named) fans. That is, how many people have favorited your blog. Hmm, wonder if any of these changes have anything to do with the Favorites exchange experiment which recently swept across the blogosphere…
A “search this site” utility has been included as well, with results sortable by order of Authority (a little or a lot). On a sidenote, I was surprised to discover some posts showing up in my results which are in a subfolder of DA, set up under a different blog name, with a different database, and supposedly blocked from searches. I only use if for testing and development. Anyone else noticed something like this (assuming you run a secondary test site)? I guess that’s another thing to add to the “research and fix” list.
Last but not least, the Technorati Tools section has been updated to make finding the buttons, widgets and API info you need a little easier.
Did I miss anything? What do you like/dislike about the refresh?
I like the new features, and I’m glad to see slightly less focus on the whole ‘favourites’ thing - but the question is, was it something that was planned anyway, or a knee-jerk reaction to the linktraining?
May 6, 07 | 3:07 pmIm not really a technorati member, but i might think of joining up.
May 6, 07 | 3:56 pmPaul-
That’s the same question I asked myself. I think it’s quite possible the impact of DoshDosh’s experiment was bigger than even he anticipated. Then again, Technorati is going to do what’s best for Technorati. Have you seen the new spin-off site Favorite Me? Don’t know if this violates the TOS, but it kinda makes you wonder if that’s taking Favorites too far.
Andy -
May 6, 07 | 4:22 pmIt’s a great way to monitor the popularity of your blog, and see who’s linking to you other than by using your dashboard. :)
Yeah - Favorite me if definitely in violation of Technorati’s TOS, although now they’ve reduced the importance of faves it’s pretty much redundant!
May 6, 07 | 6:11 pmReally like the new update. I’m looking forward to see if they’ll make the authority algorithm more complex, that is include more parameters, for example weight of a blog, instead of just blatantly counting the number of unique blogs linking to you.
May 6, 07 | 10:33 pm