Technorati Changing the Web

With today’s advanced technology individuals are able to do more with the web then they ever were! Thanks to web 2.0 individuals are able to take part in an online community whether through social networking sites, wikis, blogs and many more ways. Dave Sifry created the internet search engine Technorati. Technorati is the primary blog search engine and is used to track the blogosphere. “As blogs continue to become more and more viable news and information outlets,” Technocrati increasingly becomes more and more useful in the online world.

“Technorati is now tracking over 70 million weblogs, and we're seeing about
120,000 new weblogs being created worldwide each day. That's about 1.4 blogs
created every second of every day”

Within all of the weblogs is the increasing growth of tags (metadata) used on individual blogs. For those of you who are unsure a tag is a keyword or a term that is linked to a specific bit of information. These tags are then seen across all different forms of social media. Technorati takes these tags that blog authors have put on their sites and uses them to categorize search results, with the most recent results appearing first.

There is tremendous growth in the amount of tags being used on the web today. Individuals are using tags and clicking on tags as they have become increasingly more useful when looking for specific information. The use of tags has “become a phenomenon across the Live Web, and we are seeing a correlative explosive growth at Technorati”.

Blogs have become increasingly popular becomes they feature a variety of different languages. 37% of blogs are Japanese, the number one blogging language on the web. Following Japanese is English at 33%, Chinese at 8% and then Italian at 3%. This variety allows people from different cultures to find blogs for them on the web.

The biggest problem with this increase in blogs is that many individuals are starting to rely on blogs to get their daily news information. This is a huge issue because bloggers post information as soon as they know it and check the facts later if at all while news reporters check out information before they report. This is not good because blogs are not always going to provide accurate information. The web is also seeing an increase in splogs (Spam Blogs) with 3,000-7,000 of them being created everyday. These splogs cause more problems because they are providing their readers with false information. Sites like Technorati allow users to search for the specific things they are interested in. The problem is if it directs people to these splogs which then help spread false reporting. This seems to be common in the blogosphere.

Although Dave Sifry introduced web 2.0 to this truly amazing search engine and the use of tags, is it really successful as a source of today’s mainstream news? This quick and easy approach to finding out what we want may not be as accurate as we would like it to be. What do you think?

For more information click here.

XOX Jessica