Ah, the coming influence of the blogsphere.I know that I've posted a couple of blog-related links before: Stephen Colbert's issues with them and a possible negative consequence of them. Now, technorati.com allows you to search the blogsphere and find out what's on the minds of the bloggers.
It isn't, to quote them, "like other search engines. When you search for George Bush on other search engines, they send you to whitehouse.gov. When you search Technorati, [they] show you what millions of real people are saying, right now, about George Bush." There's even a cute little cartoony tour to show how the thing works. They don't search the whole of the web, just the whole of the blogsphere.
You're not going to find the most reliable, most un-changing information on the web through Technorati, instead you're going to find the most ephemeral information possible, as technorati's search engine only looks back for the past six days worth of information. When you check their popular section, you don't find the best books and movies of the past year; you find the most blogged-about books and movies of the past week. It's an instant pulse.
Is there value in that? Absolutely.
Are there some serious limitations to that? Absolutely, too.
Are you going to get the most important news? No.
Are you going to get the most blogged-about news? Yes.
And there-in lies the strength and problem. Technorati tracks brushfires. A group of people - possibly friends, possible intentionally - begin referencing each other and a news story. By interlinking their blog comments about this story, they begin to rise on the most-linked-to blogs. Others people check that list and begin reading what's been said. If it's interesting - note, I didn't say true - enough, more links are made, and the pages and news stories climb higher, beginning the cycle anew.
No veracity or fact-checking needed to rise to the top of this heap. Just simple popularity.
Of course, I could just be paranoid.
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