The new Technorati is beautiful. The UI is beautifully conceived and lavishly rendered, and completes the integration of tags and photos with search that Technorati has been working on for some time. It strikes me as the first of its generation of blog search engines that has fully grown up to be what it wants to be, and the UI implementation is head and shoulders above its peers. And yet, when you use it, you have the feeling of opening the door to an overstuffed closet. There’s a lot of stuff that comes tumbling at you.
The presentation reflects some real qualities of the blogosphere: In aggregate, the blogosphere is noisy, diverse, urgent, in-your-face, gah! Technorati gets across the busy-ness of the blogosphere of the last few hours, where bloggers continuously decant their paragraphs and photographs into the teeming “world live web”, as Technorati used to call it. Is this the best way to do blog search? Should blog search be a megaphone or an earphone? Should it be an amplifier, a repeater, a filter, or a tuner? Some of each? Something else entirely? A purple frog?
