Posted on July 24, 2006 at 2:46 PM in thoughts
Note: The below is an archived entry from Earthling, formerly EarthLink's official blog. The blog itself has been decommissioned and is no longer updated, and comments are trackbacks are no longer accepted.
I've often had a problem getting non-technical or non-professional web users to try blog search engine/tool suite Technorati. They seem to like it in theory, and think it's fascinating and powerful while I'm in front of their face. But once I walk away from their desk, they've lost either the nerve to use it or the grasp of why they might want to.
Technorati celebrated its third birthday with some significant changes today. Niall Kennedy tracked some of the previous iterations. One of the things they've done is expose more stuff to discover on the home page. On the one hand, this is the kind of thing that helps pull in new users, but on the other hand the more information you surface on a page, the harder you'll have to work at making the user interface intelligible. This will probably be a work in progress. Niall writes:
When Technorati had fewer features it was easy enough to highlight each option and the latest data on the front page of the site. As the number of data exploration options on the site increases I expect more interface tweaks to help users make sense of it all.
I was just in the middle of thinking, "you know, I wonder if this is too cluttery and busy for the average Google-loving american to use," when two items in the What Everyone Is Blogging About box drew my attention:
So that worked. Since I was logged in, that box appeared just above the fold, but for a new user, that would be the main item on the page. Great idea. Unless Technorati is expecting to replace my RSS reader (Reader.earthlink.net, so not bloody likely) I say they should let "What Everyone is Blogging About" box stay at the top of the page even after I've logged in. It's like a less eggheaded Techmeme and judging from those two stories, the articles behind them are as interesting as the headlines make them seem.
I do like Chris Messina's suggestion that Technorati should build a more powerful experience for the logged-in power-user: "So Dave [Sifry], think about it this way: when I come to Technorati as a blogger and as a registered user, I want Technorati to reorient and rebuild itself around me at the center." But my demands aren't quite as high -- I don't want a DVD player built-in to my TV, and I doubt I'll replace my other information-gathering tools with a Technorati super site. I like it for what it does well, but I'm not looking for an "it's all about me" experience.
Several bloggers are using "the MySpace crowd" as shorthand for who and what this redesign aims its hooks at. Fortunately there's no jarring musical selection or colored type on a colored background. I get the hyperbole, but to some degree it sounds like ivory-towerism to me. Many regular Technorati enthusiasts have probably lost touch with how hard it can be to get someone to change their information search habits. That I've read, no one is yet complaining about any particular features that went away, so what's the big deal? It's almost like we don't want our geek tools to get more widely adopted.
Comments
I use Technorati exactly as you taught me to use it, but I don't want it to do more much more. I also use ping-o-matic and pingoat to help me, but that's all I have time for. I'm not sure many people that aren't geeks have much more time to write and publish their blogs, read a few, and ping technorati......
Posted by Jerry Grasso | July 24, 2006 4:17 PM
Personally, I think the Technorati home page combines a few highly useful features with a couple of really useless ones. For example, "What everyone is blogging about" is quite useful, because it gives you an idea of what bloggers in particular, as opposed to professional journalists, are talking about. But the "Featured Bloggers" thing with the photos is a terrible way to use such a large amount of real estate--why would I care what bloggers look like? Bloggers are not, as a class, known for physical attractiveness.
I also question the use of a tag cloud to show top tags. While they are kind of neat, tag clouds take up a lot of space to convey data that would be more useful in a list format.
Note: I am looking at the logged-in home page, and these are general comments on the design, rather than this redesign.
Posted by Jeff Durland | July 24, 2006 5:02 PM
Jerry: The watchlists are worth looking at too -- setting up an rss feed that pulls in results for whatever you want on an ongoing basis. Taking time to sift through the results from time to time is really worth it.
Jeff: Interesting point about tag clouds. There was apparently a good talk about that very thing at Webvisions last week.
Posted by Dave C. | July 25, 2006 10:47 AM
Dave: Vanderwal is thinking much the same way about tag clouds as I am. Plus he makes the additional point that tags are used by a relatively small number of people.
I also suspect that tag clouds may distort the relative importance of a piece of information, in that the size of the tag increases at a greater rate than the number of entries for that tag. I think that the length and height of the tags both increase (but can't be sure because I don't know exactly how they work), resulting in a larger area being taken up by the tag than strictly warranted.
Check out Edward Tufte for more on how these sort of representations of data can be deceptive.
Posted by Jeff Durland | July 25, 2006 7:02 PM
That got me wondering if Tufte has a blog. I couldn't find one on his site, but he does have a feature called "Ask E.T." where he answers reader questions. Props to E.T. for offering an RSS feed of that.
Posted by Dave C. | July 26, 2006 4:15 PM
Jerry's first comment to me pretty much sums up Technorati for me, somebody taught him how to use it.
I consider myself to be a pretty advanced Internet consumer. I can't figure out how to use it beyond simple search, don't really care for the search results, and see have been offered no compelling reason when visiting the site to invest the time to teach myself how to learn it.
Thier traffic is essentially flat since May. Perhaps I am not alone.
Perhaps you need to teach me.
Posted by Lance Weatherby | July 27, 2006 8:06 AM
I feel like we're conflating two distinct use cases here.
One is "I'm a blogger who wants to use Technorati to get my blog entries to appear in the Technorati index."
The other is "I'm a reader/researcher/browser who wants to use Technorati to find things that interest me."
I can see people getting tripped up in the former use case, and it involves a greater investment of time and effort and upkeep to make sure it's working.
But the second use case is pretty simple and indispensable in my eyes. If you're in a business where you care what the outside world is saying about you (and this should be most businesses), searching Technorati for blog entries about your company is a really useful thing to do on a regular basis. I agree with you, Lance, that the case the Technorati home page is making is more about search in general than about learning what people are saying about you, and maybe that's the compelling use they should be pushing to end-users. When I was at BlogHer and showed someone how to search for stuff about their company, the very next thing they wanted to do is the ego-surf -- searching for their name and their boyfriend's name and their friend's names. Maybe this new redesign needs a dose of that as well.
FYI, I was reminded of this thread a few days ago again when I read a good Lifehacker piece called 10 ways to Search Technorati.
Posted by Dave Coustan | August 8, 2006 11:00 AM