Poor Technorati. They’ve had so many changes of strategy and redesigns in the last year or two that it’s hard to determine what they really want, and - a much bigger problem for the still huge blog tracker - people are likely to stop caring soon.

A clear example of the mess all these changes of focus have created is Technorati WTF, a relatively recent subsection of the site which features a Digg-like voting system on stories submitted by Technorati members. I’ve explained in detail why I think that WTF is flawed (although not necessarily a bad idea) before.

The interesting thing is that now, in the new design, this feature is nowhere to be seen. It still exists, here, it’s just not linked to anywhere on the front page of Technorati. In fact, if you don’t know the address, I don’t think it’s possible to reach it from anywhere on Technorati (correct me if I’m wrong on this one).

It’s visible in the content, too, as WTF is quite a sad sight at this moment. Several spammy stories, all over one month old, are all that WTF has to show - even in the “Recent” section. It’s probably just a matter of time before WTF gets shut down.

I still think that WTF is not such a bad idea; however, instead of stories, actual blog articles should automatically show up there, with users being able to vote them up or down. This would create a Digg-like list of recent interesting blog articles which, with a little help of crowd wisdom, might actually be relevant, instead of the seemingly arbitrary mish-mash of stories that the front page currently displays.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 5th, 2007 at 6:44 am and is filed under Web, Web 2.0, Features, News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.