Meet the Bloggerati at Technorati

Welcome to the 2nd installment of “Heroes,” a series of stories explaining how and why I use social media tools to enhance productivity and better my life. My thoughts are interspersed with the words of industry leaders who are the people behind the tools. Their words are extracted from the book, “Web 2.0 Heroes,” by Bradley L. Jones.

The definition of social media, according to Rob Safuto, involves sharing, discussing, and providing feedback on text, video, audio, and images published on the web.

Social media content is indexed on blog search engines like Technorati faster than you can snap your fingers. Formed in 2002, the company indexes and tags about a million blogs and videos every day.

Dorion Carroll, the company’s vice president of engineering, indicates a million blogs involves an order of approximately 2 to 3 million blog posts and 10 million links going from one post to another. Here is an example of a random link.

As soon as I publish this post, Technorati will receive an automatic “ping” that ariwriter.com published new content and in less than one second, this page will be indexed and available as a result for anyone searching on that site for my name.

“Technorati brings this instant flow of information to the web,” he says about the search engine that tracks over 110 million blogs and over 250 million items of social media content at every half-second of every day.

Is Technorati dying?

Shel Israel and Joseph Thornley suggest Technorati is near vaporization, due to the larger index of Google Blog Search, which the ubiquitous behemoth launched in 2005.

I realize everything online is changing very quickly, but it was only 16 months ago when Robert Scoble asked his readers to comment on the difference between the two blog search engines and the overwhelming response was Technorati provided more links and less spam.

What does it mean when I search on Technorati for “Michael Phelps” and find 11,030 results; whereas Google Blog Search provides 279,743?

To a degree, Dorion admits the company’s history of outages and spidering techniques are less than ideal, but he raises the sustainability element of a company like Technorati, citing their 30 employees in contrast to the who-knows-how-many workers at Google.

I admire that and respect healthy competition to enable everyone to work harder, but is there a breaking point?

Technorati indexes over 175,000 new blogs every day!

If history repeats itself, all good things must come to an end.

With this week’s announcement that the company bought online community Bloglines, some people, including Noah Mallin and Eric Berlin, suggest healthy changes are in store.

Until then, you should visit Technorati and Google Blog Search and see for yourself that within seconds after publishing a post, it’s available somewhere else.

“Web 2.0 is about authenticity, accountability, interaction, and this idea of the people-powered or the social web, says Dorion.

“It’s no longer the one-way web, where a bunch of corporations or people with deep pockets can actually afford a website and they put a message up so you can read it. Rather, it’s a place where, anybody, for free, can put their opinion out there and have the opportunity to be discovered.”

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Tagged as: productivity

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