There’s been a fair amount of controversy sparked by blog search service Technorati’s presence at a recent industry panel. SiliconValleyWatcher was also on the panel, and posted this disquieting recap that takes issue with Technorati’s attempts to find a business model and/or paying customer base from their work to date:
What surprised me was how aggressively Mr Hirshberg was pitching Technorati’s expensive blog tracking services to this audience of agency and corporate communications professionals.
And from that single post, a blog version of that old standby, the telephone game, kicked off (see the Doc Searls post I link to below for the Cliff Notes linkage if you’re interested.) SVW and Jeremy Wright both raise concerns about Technorati’s product helping marketers ‘control’ content.
(There’s also some grumbling about Technorati profiting off the work bloggers have done without attempts to ‘pay it back’ to the blogging community in some way – an argument I’ll get back to in a subsequent post.)
Wright also raises the valid concern that Technorati ought to get their own technological ducks in a row before incenting others to pay for a service that’s been sporadically slow and unreliable for quite some time.
But I don’t buy the premise that giving companies and others the ability to monitor what’s being said about them in the blogosphere automatically gives those companies any control or increased power.
Smart companies want to know how they’re being regarded – whether in print or online. Many companies pay firms ungodly sums of money to monitor their print visibility, and although the online world has proven much more difficult to track, it only makes sense that companies will be all over tools and services to help them evaluate their reputations online as well.
But – what’s the problem here? Isn’t part of the central premise of blogging the author’s desire to be listened to? Haven’t many bloggers done all kinds of things to raise their visibility – registering with services like Technorati, for starters? Why do we not want those most able to make the kinds of changes to the products and services we’re complaining about, for examle, to read our words?
Doc Searls (a Technorati adviser) takes it in a slightly different direction in this post:
Next: Are marketers clueless or cluefull about blogging?
If the answer is “clueless,” then don’t we want them to get the clues? Especially if all the raw data is nothing more than what’s been published on the free and open Web, and what’s sold is data about data rather than “repurposed content”?
Exactly.
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