Interesting: Technorati’s WTF.

I played around a bit with Technorati’s new WTF service. “WTF” stands for “Where’s The Fire,” not what… you might be thinking. It’s kind of an odd approach, but the more I think about it, it has potential. Rather than a link-submission thing, a closer analogy is as a user-rated comments / Wikipedia – and a Wikipedia where you can’t edit others’ contributions.

Basically, it’s a combination of several ideas. You start out with a topic, which you choose, and you are asked define. Most obviously this could be something that people are searching for or blogging about, but it quite literally could be anything of your choosing. So right off the bat, submissions are going to be organized much more finely than just broad topics of movies, technology, apple (as they are on digg).

The second aspect is that a “blurb” is written about said topic, which can consist of one link or many links, but also could just be a written paragraph or two. By removing the requirement of a link, this “blurb” could basically be a definition: hence my thought of a Wikipedia entry, or even a comment regarding said topic.

The last aspect worth mentioning is that the blurbs, once submitted, can be ranked by other Technorati users and therefore rise or fall in importance.

So it’s interesting. I made a first blurb based on the topic of “cats”. It’s just a paragraph of liking cats with a few links to popular cat sites. We’ll see if it gets popular, but right now it’s the first.

Interesting: Cats.

Another interesting item of note, if you do a standard Technorati search of the indexed blogs, the WTF entry appears above all the search items. Perhaps this is meant as incentive to get more users adding WTF entries to topics, but entering in a WTF about your favorite subject, right now, will likely be the first.

Interesting: Cats on top.

It seems many are starting out by putting links to other sites or their own blogs (as with Digg) in these WTF blurbs. But I think the service will wind up being used differently, and could end up being very appealing, because it’s obviously much easier to write a comment or a short paragraph definition than a long article.

So anyhow, I can’t predict how successful this will be in the long run. But it might alleviate some concerns that as far as blog search is concerned (which is supposed to be Technorati’s purpose) is kind of floundering. One complaint I have is that Technorati includes MySpace blogs. Therefore, a search for even “WTF” returns many usages of that term in say… its more common understood meaning. Now, someone has defined “WTF” at least as how Technorati wants to, via a blurb (I think I should add the more common meaning for laughs, plus to see if it can get higher in the user ratings). I’ve also noticed I’m not using Technorati as much to search for blogs, instead turning to Megite, Techmeme, and MyBlogLog. So this move might pull me back to using Technorati, using it more like a social news site.

I could see things going either way: since its use isn’t that clearly defined, it might lead to tons of different blurb styles, hence hampering its reliability. But in some strange way, its flexibility might turn out to be a strength, as perhaps the “community” will determine its ultimate direction.

But why didn’t they pick a more appropriate name? WTF were they thinking?

Additional reading: Technorati: WTF, (humorous take)

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Categories: Interesting, Technology :: ::

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