Wired News: Technorati: A New Public Utility

The number of posts on blogs tracked by Technorati increased 30 percent, from about 850,000 a day in July to 1.2 million on the day of the attacks. Nine of the 10 most popular search requests involved the unfolding tragedy in London.

If you think about it, Technorati has become a public utility on a global scale.

While Google didn’t invent the internet, it made it easier to navigate by organizing billions of web pages. Today there are about 12 million blogs, with 10 new ones created every second. Since March, the number of posts has increased 40 percent a month, from about 350,000 a day to 850,000 a day.

At its essence, Technorati may be a search engine, but its approach is vastly different. Google, for instance, views the web as the world’s largest reference library, where information is static. Instead of the Dewey Decimal System, Google employs its PageRank technology, which orders search results based on relevance. Google uses words like web page, catalogs and directory, which are more than just words: They convey an entire worldview.

In contrast, Technorati sees the internet as a stream of conversations. This makes it much more immediate. Google requires two to three weeks to input a site into its search engine. (Although it does post frequently updated content from news sites.)

…”With Technorati, you know what is being said, when it is said, and who is saying it,” Sifry said. You can track the metamorphosis of an idea, not only who commented on it last but who came up with it first.

…Sifry believes when you stop thinking of the web as pages and documents, you begin to understand it’s all about people.

“I like to think of a blog as the record of the exhaust of a person’s attention stream over time,” he said. “You actually feel like you know the person. You see their style, the words they use, their kids, whatever there is.”

…Someone has to cut through all the contemporaneous smog, however, and that would be Technorati, which includes information about every poster in each search result. That way you can gauge bloggers’ “net attention” — calculated by the number of people who link to them — so you can locate the most authoritative views. Or stick to the default mode, which lists blog entries chronologically starting with the freshest.