David Sifry provided part two of his State of the Blogosphere report, and announced a couple of new tools for the Technorati blog search engine.
Forget about the Long Tail of blogs. The Big Head carries a lot more weight on Technorati now.
Sifry delivered the second part of his State of the Blogosphere report online. In it, he noted in one graph how the media attention curve, that is, the number of links to news and media sites, swells to a Big Head.
The Big Head of sites with 10,000 or more inbound links includes sites like the New York Times and the Washington Post. It also includes four blogs: Boing Boing, Engadget, PostSecret, and Daily Kos.
Beyond that group, as we slither down the Long Tail of the attention curve, comes the Magic Middle as Sifry called it. Seeing some authoritative and engaging blogs from a group of some 155,000 bloggers, whose sites have between 20 and 1,000 inbound links, gave him the idea of creating something to tap that group.
The Technorati Explore feature searches within that group of blogs. “The idea is to use the bloggers that know the most about an area or topic to help spot the interesting trends that may never hit the “A-list”,” Sifry wrote.
Another new feature, the Technorati Slider, lets users choose from varying levels of “authority” when viewing search results. “Any authority” shows all the results available, while “a lot of authority” shows the fewest. There are stops at “a little authority” and “some authority” along the way; Sifry noted how this beta tool works:
Clicking on the green slider allows you to easily refine your search results to show greater or fewer matching blog posts. For some searches, you might want to pick and choose only posts from blogs that have been around a while and are highly influential – so pick “a lot of authority” as shown above. I’ve found this great for searches on highly trafficked topics, like “George Bush” or Olympics, or on topics that are known to get a lot of spam, like mortgage or refinance.
The Slider disappoints a little, though. After having used Yahoo’s Mindset slider, which uses Ajax to smoothly update the search results depending on the weight of “shopping” or “researching” selected, Technorati’s slider looks downright clunky, or dare we say, Web 1.0.
May we suggest to Sifry and Niall Kennedy they take a peek at this story about Yahoo’s UI libraries being opened up for development? The Technorati Slider has a lot of potential that the programming team could build.
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David Utter is a staff writer for Murdok covering technology and business.
