Technorati, once thought of as the central-hub of the blogosphere, has been taking a stumble as of late. Things were great for Technorati in earlier years. Somewhere along the line though, Technorati lost the fire. Has Technorati's time come and gone?

What has gone wrong?

A better question would be, what hasn't gone wrong? Beyond the recent "Topics" section addition, the site has made only miniscule improvements for the longest time. The Digg cloning idea, Where's the Fire, just made me want to ask what was Technorati thinking? The lack of a solid community with features to connect others is non-prevalent. It just doesn't end.

Things progressively worsened when the CEO decided to step down and the company decided fired off 8 of their workers. These things are all signs of big internal problems.

It is also bad when your developers blog has consisted of mostly bad news, but Technorati's developer blog has been just outright demoralizing in past months. Most of the recent stories have been of staff leaving the company and power outages.

WTF?

"Where's The Fire" (WTF) has been nothing but a disaster. It does not appear to be a hit amongst the Technorati community, and it is rare to see stories with over ten votes at times. It appears to be more effective as a tool for spammers who decide to advertise porn and erectile disorder treatments. There are ways to fixing this, but it might be a little too late to do so.

Since I brought up spam: attempting to use the Technorati tags to filter content results in the never ending list of porn links. Jennifer Lopez is great, but what does her being naked have to do with technology? I don't need that, and Technorati should have been developing ways for the community or themselves to effectively police this activity.

Is there any good coming from Technorati?

Not exactly. I for one am not a fan of their authority system for ranking blogs. There are an immense amount of ways to manipulate the ranking of blogs. The site's core functionality is easily scammed and taken advantage of, and is not an accurate representation of anything useful. It could be modified or enhanced in many ways, but the team just does not seem to have their priorities straight.

A ranking system should have multiple methods of computing that rank, not just one method. A single method of ranking a site could be easily scammed and in the case of Technorati, it is scammed on a daily basis. I would like to see them incorporate a way for the community to get involved in the ranking process of sites. It would be an interesting attempt and something fresh from Technorati. The current method of ranking, is simply broken.

According to Technorati, my personal blog, which has received barely a fraction of the traffic that Tech In Demand is receiving, ranks higher than this site. That makes absolutely no sense at all, and it would be frighteningly easy for me to manipulate this system to make either Tech In Demand or my personal blog's rank much higher. I am not concerned with this though, and would not bother, because Technorati is no good for ranking blogs in the current state. Everyone should understand this and accept it.

Is this the end?

No one knows what the future is for Technorati, but I do know that change are needed. The company should take a page or two from MyBlogLog or BlogCatalog which are steadily growing in popularity. Both of those services promote interaction with a community based around blogging. Technorati is failing to accomplish anything lately, except for disappointments all around.

Technorati fails as a ranking tool based on content and/or readership. I sometimes question myself and wish to question others: why even use Technorati? It tries to do too much, and fails to do any one specific thing wondrous. This could change, but the team just does not seem to have anything going for them.

Ironically enough, while writing this article, the Technorati was not functioning for over 30 minutes. It was dead. Was this a foresight for things to come?