Infoporn
: Dave Sifry is giving a talk on the wonderful Technorati, my ego-info-heroin.
: It’s now tracking 1.6 million sources — 11k new weblogs tracked per day. Since last march, he has seen a sharp increase in new weblogs from 3k per day then.
“On average, a new weblog is being created every 7.8 seconds.”
: They define churn as no posting in three months; 35 percent of weblogs starve and die thusly.
: They see more than 100,000 updates per day.
: This is beautiful: The median time now from when a post is posted to when it is in the Technorati data base is seven minutes. That makes it exponentially more powerful. That enables the conversation!
: He’s praising Amazon for creating a product ID for anything anybody wants to talk about and link to; almost all the links to Amazon are direct, deep links to products. (A wise marketer would use the cosmos to reverse that flow and look at what people are saying. See earlier Tim O’Reilly notes.)
It’s a beautiful thing! The page gives you not only the links back but shows you the linker who has the most authority (inbound links) and context for the link — a positive or negative review.
I’m sitting next to David Weinberger as we watch this. “I love him,” says Dave. Me, too.
: Sifry wants to make the data base part of the presentation. Coming… He’s asking us all to blog that link. So we’ll see how quickly they show up. The link:
http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/products.html It took three minutes for blogged links to show up on the cosmos of the cosmos.
: “We know this: It’s not the most user-friendly experience today. We’re working on that. But my goal was, let me give you great data.”
: Sifry wants to know: “Who found Salam Pax?” Great question. A few people, his friends linked to him. Then one warblogger linked to him; then Glenn Reynolds, “then voom.” It’s a way to see “meme propagation.”
It’s a new tipping point: the giving of tips.
: “Everybody talks about the power law. F’ it, I got the data!… Everybody gets the power law wrong… When you have fair access to media… by its very nature, you’re going to have a curve that looks like this…. This is not necessarily a bad thing… THis is not about the top 100. I mean, kudos to you on the top 100 but BFD….” He goes down the chart and finds guys with five links. There he sees a community. He puts up another chart showing how many people have the same number of links. “There’s a helluva lot more people who have inbound links and the aggregate number of inbound links even at the lower end of the curve greatly outnumber the top 100.” The masses matter, man!!
: He doesn’t care about Technorati as a destination site. He cares about it as a platform with data being used by others. He’s putting out APIs for all his data free for non-commercial use. Developers’ site: developers.technorati.com. He’s listing some of the better hacks.
: To get your posts indexed faster, go here.
: What’s next?
> This will lead to really powerful products reviews. (Ping Consumer Reports!)
> You can subscribe to a set of keyword and Cosmos filters that interest you (tell me whenever someone links to or comments on my company).
> Technorati will reorder your blogroll based on who’s updated. You can tell a reader that a blog has just updated (rather than constantly polling them, which is stupidly inefficient. This makes Technorati the platform for what’s new)
Go here to have Technorati check your blogroll (or OPML) for you.
> Vote links. This solves the big problem with assuming that links are link love. He suggests adding a tag that says vote equals minus one, zero (the default), or plus one. Thus, you can make it clear that those you hate don’t get more authority. Bravo!
Note to Movable Type: This needs to be added to the user interface (I see smiley faces and fingers).
Somebody already suggests a more grayscale mode of voting (so we don’t keep saying that we’re a red-and-blue nation).
> Geographic search and filtering will come in time (as input of geocoding becomes automated).
: He talks about breaking news and being too busy to follow the news. And then he realized, “gee, we’re tracking 1.6 million people who probably have more time than I do….[beat for punchline] in aggregate.” Breaking news “is using you as my collaborative filter on the world.” He made rules: at least three bloggers have to link to it and he ranks them on when they were reported. He also gives us context.
This is the GoogleNews of the future: editing by mob, not machine (and not editor).
(But this needs better design.)
He says to think of Breaking News as a blog. Current Events, on the other hand, are ranked by popularity, the articles with the most conversation going on around them.
: Jay Rosen suggests that a way to increase the credibility and attention of webloggers with journalists is to send journalists the cosmos to their articles. Great suggestion.
: Great presentation.
