Where's The Fire? It's On Technorati

Our favorite three-letter acronym has been adopted by Dave Sifry as the newest feature on his blog search site, giving it a little social media flavor by allowing people to write about current topics and others to vote on the best commentary.

Technorati, visitors have that same feeling when someone or something suddenly becomes a hot topic, but aren't sure why. Where's The Fire? comes into play. Sifry provided some backstory on how staffers would openly wonder why a topic suddenly caught fire: Technorati WTF is a mini-blog post aimed at a specific audience. Bloggers who used to try and summarize the top search results on their own blog and attract the attention of searchers can now add a note and possibly gain a reputation directly on the Technorati search result page. It's a OneBox-like placement for the knowledge search item best matching your query. That placement gives the WTF blurb the top result on a page for a search term. It's a useful idea, but we can't help but be a little concerned about how it might be misused. Even though the community can quickly vote better WTF blurbs up past less useful ones, that may not happen immediately on queries that don't have the same heavy volume of searches. As Sifry noted, anyone (logged in as a Technorati user) can write a WTF about the competition. What if Company A chooses to write that Company B "regularly tests its products on fluffy bunnies while the CEO giggles in the corner" and Company B doesn't see that right away? It looks like everyone who wants to monetize the new wave of social media marketing will have to add a Technorati WTF to the checklist for their clients when building a campaign. All those carefully planned efforts at building a viral buzz would crash when searchers found a negative, even deceptive, WTF through their queries on Technorati. Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Bookmark murdok: David Utter is a staff writer for murdok covering technology and business.