Checking in on Technorati today, I couldn’t help but notice the new design.
It’s actually very similar to Wired.com’s new design: Big, and bold — if the news is big, they play it big.
Wired’s new design was spearheaded by Razorfish, I wonder if they were employed by Technorati as well — I know they tend to get all the big clients.
Aside from the big layout (which is actually a design faupau considering not everyone has a very wide screen), at the top are a scrolling headlines, which are actually popular or incoming tags. Interesting no?
Technorati in this sense is positioning itself less as a search tool and more as a news source.
Not a bad idea. Most people agree that Technorati is still better than Google Blog Search, but considering the resources Google has, that might not last forever.
Steve Rubel has said "Blog Search is Dead and Google Killed It"
My big quip with Technocrati making this shift is that — traditionally Technorati has been a source to find new blogs and information. The biggest value of the blogosphere is it’s ability to level the media playing field. People can get exposed to new blogs, ideas, networks and organize themselves accordingly.
With the search function played down (only a bit) and the popular links to videos, blogs and music getting a bigger play on the site — how much does this water down that effect?
My guess is very little at this point in time. But the new design feels like a step in this direction. If Technorati wants to stay as a search tool — it should keep a simple, played-down design (not sure if you’ve noticed, but Google doesn’t have much of a design), but if it wants to move more in the direction of an aggregator of popular blog content, they are going in the right direction. The only problem then — where do I go to find new and interesting things to read and relate to?
But what do I know. I’m jsut another crazy blogger. Here’s the freak’n Techcrunch post on it which I’m sure would be easy to find on Technorati’s home page soon, as all the A-list bloggers will be. Too bad we don’t have a real unblogosphere.
Agreed 100%. I think they’re going down the wrong path. Technorati would have been better off sticking with the program and making their blog-search interface more user-friendly for newbies.
I noticed that Technorati’s Faves feature has been broken lately. Why aren’t they keeping their basic functionality operational, rather than branching out into unrelated areas?
I liked Technorati better the way it was before. This new stuff is clutter, it’s pig-ugly, and I have no interest in it whatsoever. It looks like an even busier version of the same high-bandwidth irritation that I can find on TV (which I hardly watch), MySpace News (still too mainstream and low-tech), Digg (don’t get me started on that!), Reddit (…), and so forth.
Technorati oughta stick to the blogs! Why is it that, as soon as somebody in the dot-com world has a winning business formula, they lose focus and downplay whatever made their service worthwhile in the first place?
BTW, thanks very much for that link to the Unblogosphere. It dovetails with some things that I’ve been trying to do.
Technorati has changed, and some of us have misgivings
Seems as though Technorati is de-emphasizing the blog search and blog networking features that made it so worthwhile, and instead trying to be a news aggregator for the general public. It’s possible that they are afraid of competition from Google’s blo…