Technorati Introduces Topics: Yawn

Technorati has introduced Topics:

[from Technorati Weblog: Introducing Technorati Topics]

[...] today we are releasing a major overhaul of the Technorati Home page and a completely new area of the site that emphasizes blogs, Technorati Topics. With Topics, we help you discover what bloggers are writing about in Entertainment, Technology, Politics, Sports, Business, and Life.

Each topic features blog posts from many of the best blogs out there to help you discover what's going on. The posts are refreshed frequently to reflect breaking news, new opinions, and the latest from the Web. We've set out to help you find some great blog posts to read and we've organized them by easy to browse topics. We considered a number of factors to get the seed list of blogs including Technorati Authority, frequency of posting, use of relevant tags, links to related subject matter and general topicality.

Everything streaming through Technorati -- millions of posts per day -- aggregated into six categories? Six? It's ridiculous.

Is the notion that someone would actually click through to the Technology Topic page and watch the posts go by? There is no search, no filter, no way to use Technorati tags to channel the torrent of posts. How could this be useful?

When I think of the dozens of things that Technorati could do to improve and leverage the treasure of all those tags, I could scream. Instead, we get this half-hearted push into Techmeme territory, but without the clustering of stories that make Techmeme usable.

This is going to be yet-another-flash-in-the-pan like the ill-designed WTF feature, which went nowhere.

As I said in a recent post, Technorati is suffering from lack of vision, big time, and if they can't get their act together, someone else -- probably Google -- will start indexing all those tags out there.

[Update 10am: A lot of detractors out there.]

Comments

[David Mastio]

We're two guys and we do it better in 60 topics and counting: www.blognetnews.com

[Blah]

I just came here from Technorati Topics!

Just so you know, it does not seem to be every post going through Technorati -- only posts from blogs with certain authority seem to be coming in.

And it is pretty addictive. Give it a try before you just rule it out.

[Stowe Boyd]

Mr Blah@mailinator.com -

Looks like you are covering your identity with a throwaway email address. Do you work for Technorati, by any chance?