Boycott Technorati?

Boycott Technorati? November 30, 2006

Posted by Todd Zeigler in Blogs, Monitoring, PR, Search, Web 2.0

A few months back Edelman Public Relations and the blog search engine Technorati announced a partnership. The gist of it seems to be that Edelman gave Techorati some funding to fast track the expansion of Technorati into other countries.

Due to Edelman’s recent troubles, some folks are raising questions about the propriety of the deal.

Me? I’d prefer that a search engine I use not take money from a PR firm in the business of molding public opinion (note that this comes from someone who does interactive PR). People love Google because they trust it and it works. They trust that the results don’t contain any human bias.

By cutting this deal, Technorati opens itself up to criticism that they are tweaking their results to help Edelman and its clients. It rasies questions I wouldn’t want raised if I was Technorati.

What do you think?

5 comment(s)

Comments

Jason Ryan - November 30th, 2006 at 4:40 pm

Given that what people are objecting to is Edelman’s (inadvertent?) practice of astroturfing, I am particularly uncomfortable about their relationship with Technorati.

I think Technorati should review the relationship and look to form partnerships where there is no (percieved or otherwise) conflicts of interest.

Why compromise your reputation for a couple of dollars?

/J
blogcampaigning - December 1st, 2006 at 1:00 am

I agree completely with Jason Ryan. It seems like there was a serious lack of judgement down at Technorati.

However, if Technorati falls, what will be there to take its place?
Robin Hamman - December 1st, 2006 at 9:31 am

I don’t feel I know enough about the deal with Edelmen to comment on whether bloggers should or shouldn’t boycott Technorati.

Regardless, as far as I’m aware, there aren’t any viable alternatives to technorati so like or not, if bloggers want to find and keep up with the conversation they’re stuck using it. Boycotting technorati would, for many bloggers, be as difficult as boycotting google.
Amanda Chapel - December 1st, 2006 at 4:48 pm

If it were me, I would have given more credit for this story to that Strumpette character. She rang this alarm bell back in October. See http://www.strumpette.com/arch.....grity.html

Sincerely,

- Amanda Chapel
Todd Zeigler - December 4th, 2006 at 11:47 am

For the record, I don’t advocate actually boycotting Technorati. I just think it is a pretty terrible idea to get in bed with a PR firm….

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