UPDATE 1/7/2010: It appears as though Technorati is inching forth, but the backlog which they are developing far outweighs the amount of blogs being approved.

UPDATE 1/7/2010: An employee, Phillip Winn, who is a senior web developer has taken up a PR stance and resumed replying to the thread. It appears as though Technorati is inching forth, but the backlog which they are developing far outweighs the amount of blogs being approved.

Technorati has been an authorative and integral part of the blogosphere, positioning itself as a benchmark and indexed search engine for blogs in the start of the Web 2.0 boom. This was then, however, and how fast things change…

In October to November of 2009 a peculiar problem arose, the real-time search engine of Technorati was no longer indexing new blogs. According to some wizardly mathemagic a new blog is created every second and Technorati, as a search engine, is not indexing any of the 26,000,000+ new blogs which were created in the past 2+ months, according to math.

But Technorati’s inactivity does not end here, a brief look over Get Satisfaction, Technorati’s official support forum, shows an utter lack of support resolution. Technorati employees are no longer offering support or resolutions. A thread, created by an employee in early November, claims that Technorati is hard at work “drastically speed[ing] up the blog claim review process”, DW provides further analysis. Fair enough; however, after my detective analysis I noticed that the last post from both employees comes on November 25th, the one year anniversary of 2008 Technorati layoffs, where their high performers were replaced by lower paid and lower skilled workers. No posts were made after the 25th.

A review of their official blog quickly sets off new alarms, the last update was on 10/21/09, something about manually sifting out all the Acai berry and make money at home crap from their entire index while working on a brand new clean data set. Prior to this date the format seems to be two posts per month, after this date there are no posts.

Lets leave their domain for a second, and look at Technorati from a 3rd perspective…

Traffic Trends.

Checking Google Trends shows an obvious decline, with some empty blocks. I downloaded the CVS and removed Jun 29, 2008 to Feb 15, 2009 as it would upset the graph. I put the data into a scatterplot and added a trend line, which forecasts Technorati’s coming demise.

Now, if we move from Google’s trendlines and check out Alexa’s more detailed stats (alexa only tracks users who have the Alexa tracking cookie, afaik). Technorati’s search volume, visitor count, and total reach is dropping faster than the 911 stock market.

So what does all this mean?

Technorati is on life-support, its pre-built scripts and algorithms are able to pull content from other sites and generate a dynamic page without human input. Search engines supposedly place higher value on websites listed on Technorati, which is terrible. Technology strategists at Tequinox have written Technorati an open letter warning of impending doom if they choose to continue these fraudulent lending business practices.

If you want to take action, DIGG THIS STORY, the more people see it the more pressure there is on Technorati to take action.