You’ve got to hand it to Technorati, they sure know how to get media and blog attention. A recent Wired article makes the extraordinary claim that Technorati is “a public utility on a global scale”. With no mention whatsoever of other blog search engines, Wired compares Technorati to Google – as if Technorati is as omnipresent in the blog search space as Google is in the Web search space. And in a sense it is, due to breathless coverage such as this Wired piece.
Technorati is everywherein theblogosphere. Even with all the recentnegative coverage about ongoing technical issues and supposedly selling out bloggers – it all drives Technorati’s media stock up. Any publicity is good publicity is an old saying that is more relevant than ever, in this new media world where attention is so hard to get.
This of course was one of the takeaways from my post last week regarding Technorati’s current dominance of the Alexa charts, over comparatively publicity-poor cousins like Feedster and PubSub (notice I didn’t use the word ‘competitor’ this time!). Some people mocked my post and said that “boiling it down to alexa traffic really doesn’t get it.”
Oh I beg to differ. What the Alexa charts showed was that Technorati gets it big time – attention, that is.
However (before you loosen up your comment-flaming fingers for a bout of furious typing) the people who dissed my post are right in some ways. There are many other companies in the blog search ‘space’ that are equal to or even better than Technorati – e.g. Feedster, PubSub, Blogdigger, Bloglines. These and others are all very worthy companies with differing technologies and not necessarily in the same niche markets. The Alexa charts didn’t do justice to that point, I totally agree.
But when it comes to getting attention and publicity and sheer buzz, Technorati is in an envious position. You only have to read the Wired piece, and look at the Alexa charts I published, to see what I mean.
