March 23, 2004

The World Live Web

Dave Sifry talks about Technorati tracking the "world live web". He also calls it a "search engine for conversations".

Some thoughts:

  • I wonder if the brand will limit its market potential. It's kind of a tongue-twister and hard-to-spell domain. It's also inherently geeky. That'll appeal to the techies and the bloggers -- but will it appeal to the mainstream 'Net user? Can Technorati cross the chasm?

  • And if it really is "conversations" that Technorati's about, then ultimately it needs to be a search engine not only for just-posted blog entries, but also for just-posted conversations going on in mailing lists, IRC sessions, chat rooms, and open IM sessions. I suspect there are far more "live" conversations going on there at anyone time than the number of people submitting a new blog entry or comment to a blog at any one time. I'd love to see an army of IRC bots go out and monitor open IRC chats, and then you could have technorati alert you to when an interesting chat is going on on a subject you're interested in, in real time. Perhaps not just the subject, but the participants as well: alert me when Mitch Kapor is talking about Chandler in an OSAF chat session in IRC....

  • As high bandwidth continues to expand into the market, prosumer-generated content will begin to take advantage of that higher bandwidth. There are already audio blogs, photo blogs, and nascent video blogs. Eventually there will be lots of video and audio blogs. How will Technorati be able to find content in these formats? Or will technorati be relagated to text only, and miss out on helping users find the very interesting, highly newsworthy (imagine: 5-minutes-old camcorder footage of some major world news event/incident) content?

more later... Posted by brian at March 23, 2004 08:50 AM

Comments

Brian,

It was great seeing you at the show, and you asked a good question, and raised some good points. For now, it really comes down to focus - keeping the wheels on the business and making sure that we're 100% accurate and operationally excellent in the areas that we cover now before tackling other areas. As for high bandwidth, we've got some interesting ideas on how to deal with non-text media, but (of course) nothing ready to show. Regarding the brand, you bring up a valid point, only time will tell what comes out of it...

Dave

Posted by: David Sifry at March 24, 2004 02:58 PM

I guess Technorati could always launch another, less geeky front-end based on the same database and crawler to cater to non-geeks.

Posted by: Seb Paquet at March 31, 2004 02:39 PM

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