560SL's + Authority in the Blogosphere

Michelle Monaghan
Originally uploaded by benbarren.

Some extracts from Mr Sifry's 2nd installment on The Blogosphere care of Technorati data. Im especially into his the underlying rationale for the new search by "authority" feature, which as nik posted is dealing with the whole inbound linklove 'authority' of different bloggers (There seems no alternative methodology yet btw) : "We frequently use the term authority on our site when we talk about inbound links, as in "a link is a vote of authority." So to maintain consistency we called this new feature, sort by authority." But in no way should this imply a value judgment. More authority doesn't necessarily mean more good or more interesting. In many instances, less authority yields more interesting results: a greater diversity of opinion, less mainstream thinking, more individual voices. The authority filter is a tool to fine tune results, and its a great way to zoom in on the voices that are commanding the most attention, and then zoom back out and listen to the whole diverse medium that is the blogosphere. With so many voices we're happy to add a new tuning control!" Some other interesting extracts from Mr Sifry : "The Magic Middle is the 155,000 or so weblogs that have garnered between 20 and 1,000 inbound links. It is a realm of topical authority and significant posting and conversation within the blogosphere... Technorati Explore is a new feature that uses the authoritative topical bloggers as a distributed editorial team, highlighting the most interesting blog posts and links in over 2,500 categories."