Technorati Kitchen

Library Clips points to Technorati Explore, the first offering from Technorati's Kitchen. The kitchen looks like an alpha/beta feature testing ground, similar to Google Labs, or the BlogPulse Showcase where we initially launched trend search and conversation tracker:

This is where we put the new stuff we're cooking up while we're still testing it out. Be warned! The stuff in the kitchen may not be perfect - that's why we haven't served it up yet! But if you'd like to give it a taste, we'd love to know what you think.

Technorati Explore gives a view of what people are talking about in the blogosphere very similar to the original idea behind BlogPulse. However, they add two additional features. Firstly, it provides categories, grouping hot links into a number of classes including Gadgets, Search, Business, Design, etc. Secondly, it is updated more frequently:

This page shows what's hot in blogs on specific topics right now.

The market is getting pretty full of link ranking/recommendation systems, both automated (memeorandum, blogdex, BlogPulse) and supervised (TailRank, del.icio.us - currently down FYI). Evaluating them is not easy - they mostly appear to give interesting but different results. One very obvious issue with Technorati's offering is that the number of links for the top ranked posts in each category is very low. In addition, the times associated with the recommendations seem pretty old when you consider the 'right now' promise. This is partly due to the fact that the default ordering is by authority (in fact, it is something called recent authority which, I imagine, is a function of authority and recency). It goes to highlight the fact that mixing authority or relevance with recency is really problematic with a standard list-like interface.

The top ranked post in the Gadgets category was posted 13 hours ago and linked to by 2 other posts. These two posts were posted 7 and 11 hours ago. The post is from Gadget Spy, who ranks 6, 159 in Technorati. In fact, Gadget Spy has cornered the Gadget category with the 4 top posts at the time of writing.

Comments

[Kevin Burton]

The quality issue is a big one. There may be multiple players in the field but the number one metric is going to be quality. Google owned search and someone's going to have to OWN quality in the meme engine space.

Depth of index, ranking algorithm, and speed of update are all very important.