DISQUS

Mark Evans · 2 years ago

I expected Technorati Topics to be more Techmeme-ish as well. What's there pales in comparison to Techmeme, Reddit, etc. It is sad and interesting to see Technorati scrambling to stay vibrant when it has such a head start just a couple of years ago.

Tish Grier · 2 years ago

I don't quite know what the whole Technorati Topics thing is about (maybe a re-working of Favorites combined with WTF?...I don't know...) but one thing I do know, and remember, is that rank was, at one time, a very important and hotly-debated topic among bloggers. The theory went that advertisers and marketers *might* want to advertise on blogs, and that they would want the top ranking blogs--the ones with them most links, not nec. readers--to be the places to put premium, high paying advertising.

it was thought that links and readers(page views) went hand in hand--that is, until some enterprising folks found ways to rig pageviews...

To get rank, one had to have a combination of permalinks and post links. Permalinks being those in people's blogrolls. Post links being those links in posts. Those are all crunched in some calculation to give you rank/authority/your position in the "--list" in the blogosphere.

There was also some other "popularity" thing brought in...but I have no idea where that measure came from...

But nowadays, blog success isn't necessarily predicated solely on rank. It can be a combination of traffic (as in page views, another disputed measurement), comments, links (both perma and post--that is, if perma still exist) or other criteria. In a world of RSS readers, trackbacks, Google Page rank, and other means of measuring influence, the notion of influence and authority being measured strictly by links isn't what it used to be.

I'll be posting more on this later at my blog.