The CEO of Technorati stepped down today after an unsuccessful search for his replacement. Why does this matter you ask? Technorati as of late has been falling behind Ask.com and Google Blog Search in providing quality search results. If it does die off…I think it would be just fine, since its redesign is very user unfriendly.
The problem is Technorati provides the Blog ranking standard that is generally excepted industry wide. Will anybody step up with a better ranking system…perhaps one built off of traffic and not links? Time will tell, but until then…online measurement continues the course of crudtastic fun.
Beyond the quantitative measuring sticks for online that have varying degrees of success (Technorati, Alexa and Compete)…here are some qualitative considerations I developed a few months ago for client work to determine relevance of blogs:
1) Subject matter – some topics are not of interest to large groups, so it will not have high traffic. It may be read by a large portion of the target group though. An example would be a blog specifically discussing Alaska National Parks.
2) Comments – Below each post in a blog is a comments section; the number of comments a blog gets is another way to determine popularity(this would not show up in the link results)
3) Visual presentation – How professional looking a site is also a determining factor; low traffic blogs often have poor or generic web development; high read blogs often have a clean professional look; shows the time and dedication blogger took to developing site
4) How often a blogger posts – If it has been over a month since the last post, the blog likely has a low relevancy; blogs need to be constantly updated to retain readership
5) Blogroll – Blogs list out other blogs it reads in its blogroll. If a site is listed in many top blogs blogroll it has more exposure
Any thoughts out there for additional qualitative or quantitative measurements?
