Technorati WTF
Technorati has launched a new memetracking service, called WTF (="Where's The Fire", supposedly). In essence, WTF is a participatory social solution where any visitor can offer a rationale as to why some meme is currently hot. For example, here is my suggestion about memetracking:
Note the "vote for this" button, which shows that Technorati is hoping to compete with Digg and other swarm intelligence types of solutions. All well and good.
But, Technorati has gone further, and has rejiggered its blog search to feature WTF posts above the blog entries returned:
[from Technorati: Where's the Fire? by Dave Sifry]Here at Technorati HQ, we know that we're taking a pretty risky step - we're putting our highest-value real estate - the topmost search result - in the hands of our community. This is a big social experiment to see if people will work together to help create something great and useful, and will use the voting system to push up the best explanations to the top. We'll be putting out lots more fixes and improvements, and of course, we're going to keep improving our core search algorithms as well, to continue to be of service to all of you.
The biggest concern I have here is that the WTF system just sidesteps the entire authority system that Technorati is tapping into, based on bloggers building up a reputation by gathering links. Now the first result someone will see of "Memetracking" is not a blog post, but a WTF post, scribbled by some random person. The WTF voting is a possible counter to the system being gamed, but its a strange diversion in some ways. (And, where is the "bury" button, when you want to anti-vote?)
Why didn't Technorati go down a more obvious path? They could have introduce voting into the search result directly. Imagine a new blog search where every returned result could have a "vote for this" on it? Then, over time, certain posts and certain blogs would gain a rating that would represent how well Technorati users think they line up with the search terms. Kevin Burton's post in the above screen shot might become the definitive post on memetracking, for example, based on the users ratings AND the links it is getting out in the blogosphere. To me, this would have made more sense, instead of a second, unintegrated solution.
One last note: Steve Rubel mentioned that WTF was launched yesterday on Twitter. This won't be the last time Twitter -- or other social presence apps -- are used to launch new offerings, I bet.
[Update: Just read Matthew Ingram's piece on WTF, and I agree that Tecnorati might be better served fixing the bugs in the existing infrastructure rather than rolling out new stuff. In the middle of last week, during the social media press release flap, I had one of those strange retrograde events: I dropped 2000 in T'rati rank in the middle of one day, only to bounce 3000 the other way the next day. T'rati apparently mislaid a few hundred blogs linking to /Message, and then found them.]
First of all, I have to confess at doing a double take at "WTF"....but I have teenage sons; secondly I couldn't agree more about fixing the bugs in the current system. I just don't get their link counting system and seem to get told every time I question it that it was a glitch that just happened to occur on my links (always to the negative) but was now fixed...that seems to be the only technorati constant.
Marianne
Posted by: Marianne Richmond | February 01, 2007 at 03:37 PM
Hello Stowe. This write-up is very helpful. At first, I was amused when I saw WTF (while monitoring blog post for an event keyword). But then again, I wish Technorati would prioritize fixing the rank and "no blog links here" status that you see in new blogs claimed. I still have blogs that were registered since October. Even though there are numerous blog links already, Technorati does not seem to recognize it (although appearing in blog post results).
Posted by: Janette Toral | February 02, 2007 at 06:28 AM