Technorati Relaunches

Technorati have just relaunched with a renewed focus on bloggers.

There’s a number of changes – firstly a new front page (which isn’t showing to me at their homepage yet for me) with news aggregation – like TechMeme. They call it the ‘Percolator’ as it shows what’s been ‘percolating’ in the blogosphere. There’s also category pages with a similar format (business, entertainment, lifestyle, politics, sport and technology).

Secondly there’s a new section called Blogger Central which is particularly for bloggers. It shows some interesting information including a ‘top tags’ section which shows trends in what tags have been used recently (including a mini chart) and blog posts about blogging.

It also shows rising posts of the day and links to the popular blogs pages.

Note: I obviously have a bias – but I’d love this page to include more than just news and high level discussion about blogging on this page – but perhaps also a section specifically for ‘blog tips’. If the idea is that it’s a page that resources bloggers by providing useful information about blogging – why not aggregate some of the best tips from the meta-blog community?

There seem to be more tools also which I’m still exploring.

I think that these are positive signs from Technorati. Their strength has always been in tracking the blogosphere and I’m glad to see them going with their strengths. I can’t wait to see the new launch – particularly that Blogger Central section.

Read more about the changes on the Technorati blog – intro to the changes, discovery, news and blogs on the new Technorati and use the Technorati Percolator to Discover the Real Time Web.

Update – More on the changes at TechCrunch, Marketing Pilgrim, Center Networks and ReadWriteWeb.

Update 2 – One thing that I’ve noticed is that on the front page – in the percolating blog posts section they don’t link from the front page directly to the blogs at all but to a secondary page which does have the link as well as other blogs linking to it. However on the Mainstream Media section they do link to the news source directly as well as their own aggregation page.

Let me illustrate:

OK – so it’s not a massive deal. But I’d have thought that for consistencies sake they’d have done the same for both mainstream media stories and blog stories.