140Char

Technorati, the blog tracking service, has now launched Twittorati, which tracks the tweets of the Top 100 Blogs they track. Apparently the plan is to include more of the web’s ‘most influential voices’.

Oh dear.

I don’t care how influential the voices are, if they’re in subjects which are completely irrelevant to me, and if they’re all presented in a jumbled stream which I can’t filter.

Interestingly it’s based on technology provided by Muck Rack, which aggregates journalists on Twitter – which makes a little more sense, but is still far too general.

The entire point of Twitter is allowing me to filter who I read by letting me follow them. And by seeing what is influential via Trending Topics and Twitter Search.

I’m in the process of collating various posts and search into the effect of Twitter on the link economy for a post later this week – but I want to include your views and comments.

It’s been sparked by a few things – including the the fact that despite receiving the same amount of traffic to both my blogs, and numerous Retweets, the ranking of them by various lists has gone down. And much of this seems to be due to a lower amount of inbound links as measured by Technorati and Yahoo.

In the grand scheme of things, the only reason measures of popularity are important for my personal blogs is it makes it easier for people to find them via search or relevant lists, allowing me to hopefully meet and interact with more people (I’m not aiming to build a media empire at the moment!).

But are you seeing the same things happening?

Do you wish Google/Technorati etc started counting Retweets as a metric of authority for a website?

Do you think the effect is proportional to the time you invest of social networks rather than interacting via blogs?

Does it matter to you?

Wikio has just updated the rankings for UK blogs, and 140Char has appeared in the list for the first time, going straight in at number 59!

Not only that, but apparently we’re 749 overall:

Wahey!

Particularly as it means I have two sites in the top 100 UK tech blogs, with TheWayoftheWeb at 71.

Not a bad start to 2009.