The folks at Technorati have introduced a new service into their mix, the Technorati Blog Finder, which is intended to help people find authoritative blogs on various topics.

Hold on a minute... isn't that what Technorati was already doing? Well, sort of. But existing services from Technorati aren't based on a persistent profile of blogs. Search just finds recent posts that include a given search term, and the Tags service finds recent posts that are tagged with the search term. The point of the Blogs service is to find blogs that are tagged -- using a different tag syntax -- as matching the search term. This is intended to be a tag-based declaration of the topics that the blog touches upon.

The Blogs service using the same algorithm for authority used to order results in Search and Tags services. In the graphic above, I searched for blogs tagged with "social media". Note the ad real estate all around.

First of all, I feel that this is a much more useful tool -- right off the bat -- than the monolithic Technorati 100 list, the Feedster 500 list, or any other all encompassing list. Finding the top 10 blogs on "social media" -- if that's what you are researching -- is much more helpful than looping through the top 100 blogs and hoping that the two lists overlap somewhere.

What I don't understand is why Technorati can't distill these lists out of Search and Tags -- why do we have to have yet another form of tag, and yet another sort of declaration?

In this case, I had to create a series of tags, like this --

<a href="technorati.com/blogs/social+media" rel="tag">social+media</a>

-- and place it somewhere on the blog that is accessible to Technorati: in my case, on the bottom of the right margin.

Still, a useful service, so long as the Technorati servers can keep up with demand -- which apparently they cannot. When I clicked this morning on Mary Hodder's Napsterization "412 links from 295 sites" to see who had been linking to her recently, I got the now-usual Technorati runaround: "Sorry, we couldn't complete your search because we're experiencing a high volume of requests right now. Please try again in a minute or add this search to your watchlist to track conversation."

I like the fact that the authority ranking emerges from the social gestures of many other people, but I would like to concoct a way for that to reside locally -- at each blog -- the way that comments and trackbacks do, now. It's great to be able to assert "this blog is about X, Y, and Z" in some way that allows people to find what they are looking for, but I remain concerned that all the raw data is contained within databases owned and operated by aggregators, such as Technorati. On the whole, though, I like the idea of being able to declare these assertions, and this service (if Technorati can ever solve its server load issues) looks very useful for the blogosphere.