Here is another reason to make Technorati tags a part of every blog post. According to Dave Sifry in his State of the Blogoshere Part II, Technorati has added a new Explore feature. Of interest to the PR community, two of the explore categories are:
This new explore tool includes postings from A-listers, such as Steve Rubel in the PR space, but it also includes bloggers that Sifry names “the magic middle” (also see Rubel’s post about this), formerly known as the B-list. In other words, these are blogs that have from 20 to 1,000 sites that link to them.
According to Sifry:
The idea is to use the bloggers that know the most about an area or topic to help spot the interesting trends that may never hit the “A-list”. We call this new section Explore, and we've seeded it with some of the most interesting topics that we could find. But one of the nice things about Explore is that there are no gatekeepers, and that anyone who writes interesting topical blog posts can get included simply by tagging his blog and tagging his posts.
Will this become a tool for mainstream media looking for a way to track the conversation among blogs that may have some “authority,” as defined by Technorati?
While Rubel thinks that links only connote popularity, I am afraid that this “popularity” is something that we need to contend with. At this time, links rule, even if they don’t give the most accurate picture. This will also be important to consider when working with clients that want to start blogs. To get the message out and break out of obscurity, we need other bloggers, even the so-called A-list and especially those in Sifry's magic middle. This may seem unfair at times, but it's the culture of the blogosphere.
We have to live with it and moreover, get over it. Also see Idea Grove, Phil's Blogservations, Rubel's Micro Persuasion posts about the A-list topic. And if you haven't already, read the latest article in New York magazine, Blog to Riches. By the way, I think some interesting stuff was missed in this article with all of the focus on the A-list nonsense.
