Heard at PRSA: Technorati’s Twilight

One of the unexpected bi-products of blogging in the PR space is the network one develops with kindred spirits around the globe. For example, last January, my new friend Trevor Cook organized a blogger meet-up…in Sydney.

At every bloggable event since then, more of the same with different casts of characters all bound by a keyboard and an interest in citizen journalism. Last night a group of new media PR types gathered for a bite following Sunday PRSA session in Philly (See pic.)

The conversation ranged from the PR value of Twitter to the death knell of Technorati. For the former, Annie Heckenberger, social media director for Philly tourism (and a former Marina Maher exec), talked about Twitter as the ideal channel for keeping colleagues apprised, in real-time, of plans for upcoming shared collaborations. Someone else mentioned how it saved one company tens of thousands of dollars in text-message fees.

As for Technorati, the bane of my existence, Josh Hallett observed how a simple Technorati search of his client that yielded a hundred thousand+ results a few months ago, now yields only a thousand+. (Google Blog Search still produced 100K+.) Something fishy is going on there. The question is whether it’s an aberration or not.

Update (10.31): Technorati weighs in: “Hit counts are often dubious metrics. Index rebuilds, spam purges and other search engine management functions will always cause fluctuations. As part of Technorati’s cost and performance management efforts, we’ve been running the service with the data sets of historic data scaled back. We may bring that data back online in the future but the days of monotonically ascending hit counts are currently suspended.” best regards, Ian Kallen Email Homepage 10.31.07 – 11:06 am