Technorati Adds Current Events Feature to its Blogosphere Analysis Tools
Doc Searls scooped everyone yesterday with his story about Dave Sifry's latest addition to Technorati. This is a feature Sifry is calling Current Events in the Blogosphere. Sifry explains the design of this new feature on his own weblog. He says:
It is a list of the top links to "professional" news sites by bloggers in the last two hours, along with comments and analysis. I created it because, like most people, I've been following the progress of the war, watching and reading the mass media, and I wanted to know what people out there were saying about the news. What are the most important stories? What is real, and what is propaganda? What is not being reported, or is being underreported?
In our opinion, this type of current events aggregator is a great application of RSS. A lot of webloggers write about current events. The keys to getting value out of browsing an aggregation of current events articles from weblogs are:
- immediacy of the information (hence, the 2 hour aggregation window)
- relevance of any commentary that surrounds the link to the story
It's already obvious that you are going to get a wide range of opinions related news stories through this service. This makes it a complement to Google News.
This raises the inevitable question: Why didn't Google roll out a feature like this within days of the Blogger acquisition?