First: The creator of Technorati, Dave Sifry, commented on my note about bloggers and journalism last week. He notes:
…if people stop linking to you, your Technorati ranking will drop – and if a blog is removed from a blogroll, the ranking will drop faster. I’ve also been talking with folks like Kevin Marks about his Vote Links initiative, which would place an extra attribute in a link tag to show whether you are approving of the link, neutral, or negative, which can then be used to make further judgements about things like notoriety.
Which puts a little more muscle behind “shunning.” And makes the subtle social dynamics of the blog world replicate middle school just a little more. I’m almost kidding—I think “vote links” is a fricking brilliant idea and long overdue. Just… wow.
Anyway, onto the second point: Doc points to the newest feature at Technorati: blog keyword search. Beating Google to the punch, over 360,000 blogs indexed and ready—plus an API.
The search is pretty cool, though I wonder if indexing by the Technorati ranking of the parent site alone is the right thing to do. After all, someone may only have three inbound links but be the total authority on some obscure search term.