Thanks, Chris Anderson for the kind words. I'll have to repay them by explaining where he is wrong again.
Chris writes:
Technorati is a blog aggregator without a community.
This is true when you use Technorati as a pure zeitgeist-check, to find what the blogosphere is dithering about today (Karl Rove and Windows Vista).
But it is false for one of the most interesting and valuable applications of Technorati -- conversation discovery. Bloggers use Technorati to find which other blogs are responding to their posts, so they can continue the conversation.
In an era of comment spam, Technorati has become a primary method of knitting together cross-blog conversation. Technorati helps make conversations and subcommunities visible. The "community" of Technorati is not a feature of the service itself. But Technorati is a key, and hidden component of the blogosphere's long-tail communities.
Posted by alevin at July 28, 2005 11:33 PM | TrackBackThanks, Adina, you've hit the nail on the head, that's exactly right. I like to think that Technorati is a tol that helps to expose and enable people to create their own communities, both large and small.
Dave
Posted by: David Sifry on July 30, 2005 05:15 PM