The New Technorati: Real-Time Influence

A recent tweet by Dave winer made me realize I had completely missed Technorati launching a new strategy.

Dave tweeted this:

davewiner: In the new scheme Technorati rates my blog a 0 on a scale of 1 to 1000. Gulp. http://r2.ly/pe2g

I went and looked: /Message now has an authority of 592, which is not bad. And it looks like a whole lot of blogs that had been higher ranked have tumbled from the list ahead of me, since /Message is now ranked 1290, and a few weeks ago it was around 6000.

[via Technorati to change how it measures bloggers’ influence | VentureBeat by Dean Takahashi]

Technorati is about to make some big changes to the way it measures how important bloggers are. That means its top-100 list of the most influential bloggers is going to change. Some bloggers may be delighted by the changes, while others who drop in the rankings may howl in protest.

Basically, the company is going to reduce the costs of indexing the blogosphere and reporting the results on its Technorati.com site, which is a major blog search engine. It is not going to index the blogosphere just for the sake of saying it can do so. It is also going to put more emphasis into its business which pays the bills: the Technorati Media ad network, which serves ads to more than 400 sites, not just Technorati.com

“We were spending way too much money,” said Richard Jalichandra, who became chief executive of the San Francisco company in 2007 (see his guest post). “This is a turnaround situation. The company had business, but it was in a small amount of trouble. The company was conceived for a different kind of Internet. Now, besides blogs, there is Twitter, social networking, and the real-time web.”

The processing requirements for the index have grown dramatically as the blogosphere has blossomed into hundreds of millions of blogs. And of the 300 million plus blogs out there, only a fraction of them are updated often.

In the past, Technorati used about six months worth of data to determine its authority rankings. Now it will use a few weeks, but it will capture the slices of data more frequently to keep up with real-time changes. That’s based on the notion that 90 percent of the searches yield information that is less than six months old. In a way, Technorati is dropping out of the race with Google and other search companies that are trying to build the infrastructure necessary to capture everything that happens on the web.

Technorati is also going to emphasize “relevancy.” The index will try to capture changes in the blogosphere that are relevant to people who are searching through the blogs. The results should deliver relevant results from authoritative sources, not just the latest inane Tweets. Technorati will divide the index into more relevant categories, such as sports blogs.

Although Technorati’s motivations for changing the algorithm underneath Authority and Rank is financial, the end result is a pair of metrics that are more real time, and may be a better indication of the ‘real-time influence’ of the blogs measured. By real-teim influence I mean the likely influence that the blog has had on recent readers in the recent past.

This could be even more of an effect if and when Technorati starts to incorporate Twitter references into its measures, as the CEO, Jalichandra, says they plan to do.