Lately, I’ve found that Technorati searches to find who’s responded to my posts have become unbearably slow. Often it takes a few searches in a row for results to show up.
A Technorati employee explained that they’ve got a problem in the queue to fix that affects only midlist blogs. Currently, searches are more efficient for blogs with a great many links, and those with only one or two links. Searches are painfully slow in the middle.
This makes Technorati less useful for conversation discovery, particularly for the people who desire it most. Will Wheaton is a celebrity with high link rank from adoring fans. He probably isn’t interested in talking back to all the fans who write about him, except in a selective “fan letter quote” manner. He’s probably most concerned with the size of the audience, because that helps drive the audience and word of mounth for his books and television shows.
Midlist bloggers probably care most about conversation discovery — they are blogging in order to participate in a conversation, and each cogent reference is valuable.
Whether the segment is valuable to Technorati depends on their business model. Niche blogs with subcommunity connections ought to have value — more value than can be unlocked yet. The question is whether Technorati’s customers are marketers and advertisers to whom they simply sell metrics — in which case it doesnt’ matter if the system performs poorly for the midlist. Or whether there’s value with those users directly, by showing ads to them or providing paid services.
The easiest way around this is to go to technorati, blogpulse, waypath, pubsub, blogdigger, feedster, etc, etc and subscribe to feeds that monitor mentions of yur names. This way, you don’t have to go to the sites. The references come to you in your aggregator.