Everyone who has spent more than a few minutes in the blogosphere has at least heard of Technorati. Technorati is a service that initially was designed to track blogs and rate them based on “how important they were”. The proxy for importance was how many links to these blogs existed from how many different sites.

Technorati also was one of the first services to really build on the concept of tagging. Blogs the world over started using tags so that, among other things, they could become more relevant and generate more search results from within Technorati.

Thinking about both of these uses, you’ll notice the word “blog” comes up over and over again. Tonight, Technorati is trying to change that.

The New Technorati

This repositioned Technorati is taking a more general approach to searching the web. Multiple search bars have been replaced by a single, universal search bar and new “stock ticker” of the moments top tags has been pasted unceremoniously into the header.

It is a lot cleaner, I will say, but this new interface causes Technorati to lose some of the unique, blog-centric feel that made it popular to begin with.

What Technorati Was Meant To Be

Expanding your features is one thing, but designing away from what you are good at is entirely different. Google’s Universal Search, not to mention its new trending services are ramping up soon, and positioning yourself as a sort of general purpose, catch-all, search all media and spit back results ordered by category is pretty soon going to be swallowed up by Google’s war machine.

Technorati’s one real strength has always that it is the perfect engine to play on bloggers egos. Through its “Authority” system, it gives you a metric to track how important you are, and people will interact with the system until they are blue in the face if they think it will help push them into the top 100,000.

Realized search might drive eyeballs, but I still don’t see how it can be a long term value proposition for them.

Web 2.0 Roundup

Change, at times, can be good. Technorati has needed to consolidate its offerings for a long time now. Between “Top Tags” and “Top Seach” and “Top … ” the system was producing a lot on noise on top of its signal.

Is this the right way to push things though?

According to TechCrunch, Dave Sifry the founding CEO is currently in position to lose his job. Maybe this is one final play to retain it, or maybe this is just a sign of the lack of strategic vision that may inevitable cost him his position.

Or maybe, it’ll all work out for the blogosphere’s favorite search engine — I still say that either way, they need to drop the ticker.