Mike Arrington at TechCrunch seems fairly optimistic about Technorati’s latest attempts to refocus the site, and perhaps it would be fair to give the new CEO a little time before we assess his chances of failure, but I must admit that I’m underwhelmed so far. It’s great to say that the site wants to get back to focusing on bloggers, but slapping up a home page that tracks blog posts and creating a “Blogger Central” page doesn’t really do it for me (although Winextra seems to like it).
As for the “Percolator,” I don’t see how it’s really any different from Technorati WTF or Technorati Explore, or any of the other attempts the site made in the past to become the aggregator of choice. Mike says in his post that he goes to Technorati several times a day, and sees himself using it a lot more if these changes catch hold. I’m not sure what Mike is doing there two or three times a day, but I know that I hardly ever go there, and I haven’t noticed my life or blogging suffering as a result.
As far as I can tell, Percolator is no better than Techmeme.com — and in fact not even in the same league really — or Propeller, or even Blogrunner for that matter (now owned by the New York Times). I think Technorati is going to have to do a little better than that to show everyone it’s back on track. And MG Siegler at ParisLemon is right, they could start by trying harder to get rid of the splogs in their links.