Here's another item to file under Changes that customers didn't ask for: Technorati's recent makeover. The official "Welcome To The New Technorati" blog post trumpets how great it is that the company has put a big effort into different content channels (sports, entertainment, etc.). Unfortunately, for the bloggers who use Technorati to measure their popularity in the blogosphere, the New Technorati is, for the time being, a big step backwards.
And yes, I'm one of those irritated bloggers. I'm not that interested in the numeric "authority" ranking of my blog, though it's nice to see it get a bump every once in a while. I do care a great deal, however, about spotting the people who link to this blog.
For reasons unclear to practically everyone outside Technorati, the company decided to break those two features when it launched the New Technorati last month. Scroll down to the comments section of this follow-up post to hear the complaints. Some blog rankings mysteriously dropped to the lowest possible rankings (including mine). Others disappeared altogether. For some problems, the only workaround is creating a Technorati entry from scratch, which turns out to be impossible, since you can't delete an existing blog. And the backlinks feature, which identifies places where people have linked to your blog, has disappeared altogether, with no announced date that I can find for its replacement.
All of which makes the following comment from the Eric Olsen, Technorati's "publisher," exceedingly frustrating:
Now, as to the conceptual matter of original content on Technorati itself, I utterly reject the notion that Technorati has somehow betrayed bloggers. I am clearly biased here, but I see it diametrically the opposite - we are providing a new set of tools to help bloggers achieve their goals: readers, branding, exposure, community, and even more goodies coming. Of course, it's up to each individual blogger if he/she chooses to avail themselves of this opportunity, but I think it's a bit solipsistic to denegrate the entire movement just because one chooses not to be involved.
Which is a lot like saying, "We gave you a hacksaw and a box cutter, while taking away your hammer and breaking your screwdriver. Hey, we're not betraying you by making this move. We're just providing you with new tools."
Of course, the fact that Olsen's title is "publisher" implies that the corporate strategy is a lot like Yahoo!'s, several years ago: invest a lot into becoming a content provider, while putting less effort into your online tools. Could someone remind me how that turned out...?
P.S. I'm not being less forgiving of Technorati than I was of Oracle recent site upgrade drama, just because it's my proverbial ox that's gored this time. At least there were customers who were complaining about the old Metalink support site, and wanted a replacement. (For example, many Siebel customers, post-acquisition, asked for a better site than Metalink.) As far as I can tell, no Technorati customers were clamoring for the site to roll out a bunch of new content channels. I suspect that decision had more to do with how they thought they might "monetize" their directory of blog content.
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