ETech: Technorati Presentation

Related link: http://www.technorati.com/

ETech 2004 is in full swing and my talk is behind me -- time to do some serious blogging!

My favorite session of the day covered the basics and the newest glitzy features in Technorati. David Sifry explained how Technorati aggregates trackback pings from 100,000 weblogs daily and creates a link cosmos for a given URL. The link cosmos tells webloggers how many other weblogs have linked to a particular weblog entry.

At the most basic level Technorati lets webloggers know how well connected their weblog is -- from this you can infer the basic picture of how healthy and effective your weblog is. On a macroscopic level it shows the overall health of the blogosphere as well. 100,000 updated weglogs per day and a new weblog being created every 7.8 second shows us that weblogging is alive and well. With so many weblogs being created, it begs the question how many of these are abandoned -- Technorati has an answer for us: 35% of all weblogs are dead, where a weblog is considered dead if it hasn't been updated in 3 months.

So far, that's all interesting, but pretty simple stuff. The really interesting aspects of Technorati come into play when you consider the vast amount of data that has been accumulated and what can be done by analyzing and mining this data. Sifry pondered if there was any substance to Clay's claim about Powerlaws and weblogs and concluded: "F*ck it, I have the data!".

Sure enough, Kevin Marks had plotted the data collected from Technorati and also came up with this cool log-log graph which proves that there is a powerlaw in weblogs. Not surprising -- I bought into Clay's argument a while ago -- but it was really nice that a graph showed the reality of what is actually happening.

I had visited Technorati before, but I never really grokked the deep implications of their work. Technorati has a clear grasp of the health of the blogosphere and a vast amount of data from which to draw more conclusions. With very little hacking Sifry managed to create Top products discussed in the last 24 hours.

Technorati has all sorts of plans for adding more features and extending their REST based API -- I'm curious to see what Sifry & Co will come up with next. I'm glad to have learned about this cool resource -- thanks for the great talk Mr Sifry!

What do you think of Technorati?