So the recent news discussed by everyone is Technorati adding the Filter By Authority slider (OK I don’t see it as really big news as there was a clear tendency towards that move – Technorati has been offering sorting the results by authority for ages now, the only difference is the interface and that now the bottom results might not display at all). What it led me to think of, however, is the analogy with Google PageRank – the original idea was very similar. As the focus moves from the old fashioned static sites to the Blogosphere (or, as the Blogosphere becomes the new Internet – whichever you like more), is Technorati following Google’s footsteps, but blogging style, and where will it take them in the long term perspective?
We all know what happened to Google PageRank over the years – from being an innovative way to make sense of the SERPs as a whole and each individual site, it has degraded into something useless, dubious and spammed to death as more and more people found and exploited ways to manipulate it (or at least its visible representation). Now that the stakes are getting high in the blogging world, will people try to manipulate Technorati’s authority filters in a similar way, until the whole idea is devalued? Well, maybe – or maybe not.
Thing is, with the Blogosphere, it’s a whole new game – as there’s the social element involved. Which might just happen to make it work better than the old PageRank. Due to this social element, it’s not about scripting and button pushing anymore – it’s rather about social engineering – and that is something more difficult to fake and does require the real value for any individual blog or blogging personality to make it to the top. Well, we’re gonna see as time goes how it all works out.
In the meantime, it looks like Google doesn’t intend to give up. It is definitely working out ways to deal with the Blogosphere. Lee Odden reports on Google’s acquisition of Measure Map, a blog analytics provider – definitely a move towards embracing the blogs data and making sense of it.