Technorati Has a New Look

If you visit Technorati’s front page you will see a whole new design. Now they have a section featuring blog posts that are gaining attention around the blogosphore. The interesting thing is that this section is divided in two parts, the left one being dedicated to blog posts and the right to mainstream media articles. I wonder where a post on a New York Times blog would be featured….

Once you click on a particular item you get transfered to another page that contains the actual link to the story, a description and all the related blog reactions (very similar to how Techmeme works).

I agree with Michael Arrington that this is a move in the right direction. In his own words:

The new products are encouraging signs from Technorati, which has had to reinvent itself a number of times over its existence. Their core blog search business has been under fire from Google and others for some time. But the site is still synonymous with blogging for most of us, and has a store of goodwill that has yet to run dry.

Will the new product drive core usage and page views? I think it has a real shot. It’s much better than the existing home page (and the one before that, which really pulled away from bloggers). I already visit Technorati multiple times per day. I can see increasing that usage with the new stuff.

Technorati had already tried to spark new interest among its users by launching a social bookmarking tool called “Where’s The Fire.” It failed miserably. One thing that I could never understand is how Technorati, with an Alexa rank of 345 and supposedly millions of page views daily, could send so little traffic through its links. Time will tell if these changes will help.

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