Technorati as a Public Utility

Adam Penenburg writes Media Hack for Wired News (not the same as Wired Magazine although part of the same organization). He's also an assistant professor at New York University. In a recent article he suggests that Technorati, the search engine of the blogosphere, has become a global public utility.

At its essence, Technorati may be a search engine, but its approach is vastly different. Google, for instance, views the web as the world's largest reference library, where information is static. Instead of the Dewey Decimal System, Google employs its PageRank technology, which orders search results based on relevance...In contrast, Technorati sees the internet as a stream of conversations.

Unfortunately, the stream of conversations on the internet are no more profound than the stream of conversations overheard in any food court of a big mall. At the time of writing, Technorati reports that the most discussed news story is the death of James "Scotty" Doohan, with 363 blogs linking to the story. Today's bomb explosions in my birth city, London, has 52 links.

David Sifry, Technorati's founder and CEO, uses a phrase in the article I've not come across before but I confess I love it because it so clearly defines a phenomenon... "meme epidemiology", that is the determination as to why some memes are contagious and some aren't.