Technorati, the incumbent blog search engine, has launched a new design today, as well as a number of features which reflect a change of emphasis.

The redesign itself is very nice; it’s more minimalist than any recent effort, and gives big emphasis to discovery of content, with a frankly enormous tag cloud and a selection of three videos, blogs and music albums which are deemed to be of the moment. Visually it maintains the obligatory rounded corners, so it must be a success.  The interface throughout is tidier and more effective than previously.

An interesting change (in that I don’t remember it last time I used Technorati) is in the search engine results pages (SERPs). They are manfully attempting to do something fairly similar to Google’s recently announced Universal Search, in which a single search will result in the most relevant content, whatever the form. On Google this can include anything from text to images, maps to books. On Technorati this would include video content, podcasts and blog posts, for example.

Technorati is, however, less successful than Google. Their attempt revolves around a ‘featured’ tab on the search, which is far less clever than Google, because all they do is search various mediums and then plonk it in a relevant box. Video results are shown in the video box, blogs in the blog box. You get the idea. This easier to do because it doesn’t require ranking algorithm, and all it really amounts to is a metasearch of the different content-type searches. Whilst a nice UI touch, it isn’t really much more than that. They continue to push using Technorati tags; if you want to show up on that ‘featured’ page, my initial look would suggest that you must use them.

So what’s that change in emphasis that I mentioned then? CEO Dave Sifry alludes to it in his post on the Technorati blog:

Whereas folks using Technorati a couple of years ago were predominantly coming to us to search the blogosphere to surface the conversations that were most interesting to them, today they are increasingly coming to our site to get the 360 degree context of the Live Web - blogs of course, but also user-generated video, photos, podcasts, music, games and more.

I think what he’s talking about (the emergence of many different forms of new media) only really scratches the surface of what Technorati is becoming, or could become. I’ve talked before about the problems of content discoverability in the long tail (explanation of what that means), and Technorati is well placed to provide a completely different solution to the problem from what’s being done by the current leaders in the area (Digg, Del.icio.us and StumbleUpon).

Through some sophisticated, well developed algorithms, it should be possible to leverage the vast number of blogs which they search to come up with personalised recommendations for a person based on their OPML file and/or web history, by analysing past reading patterns and then ranking possible content recommendations by similarity and discussion on other blogs. At the moment all they do is come up with the one-size-fits-all suggestions that you see on the homepage, which is possibly useful but of fairly limited value.

All in all, an update that goes in the right direction but isn’t massively exciting. The UI is now impressive, and they appear to have recognised their importance in facilitating the discovery of content. They’re not doing such a great job in that, or the universal search idea, at the moment but that will come. They face the ever-present challenge of Google Blogsearch, but seem to be growing well and crucially they are out-innovating Google in the space at the moment.

Today restrictions were limited on the number of invitations which could be sent by a Joost user, effectively making it open to everyone (so long as they can find someone who already has it).

Formerly The Venice Project, Joost is an on-demand IPTV (television over the internet) startup from the founders of Skype, and it has has never been far from the blogosphere’s attention. Indeed everyone in media seems to have decided that it is the ‘next big thing’. It looks like the whole effort is going well - they’ve done deals with many key content providers which will ensure that they will have TV franchises such as CSI available, and last week I got yet another press release telling me that they have secured advertising from the likes of Coca-Cola and Nike. I’ve been part of the closed beta since it was called The Venice Project, and I wanted to take the opportunity to do a look at the product, the ideas behind it and its chances for success. This is an obscenely long post, for which I apologise, but I think it does cover most of the important aspects of the product.

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The idea of the ‘Attention Economy’ is well defined by Alex Iskold at Read/WriteWeb. Companies have always endeavored to find out as much information as they can about their customers in order to improve the services they deliver or in some cases to sell this information to other companies. Information about people has always been a valuable commodity. The Attention Economy is about digging deeper and extracting more detailed information about where people devote their ‘Attention’. The history log of your web browser is a good example of your where your recent attention has been devoted to on the web and it is interesting, and perhaps inevitable, that Google is seeking to make use of this information with its Web History product.

There are already a host of services our there such as StumbleUpon which uses your browsing behavior to recommend sites you might like to visit. Even Last.fm uses your ‘Attention Information’ on your iTunes playlist (how many times you’ve listed to various songs) to create a personalised radio station which is tailored to your particular taste. Particls, which Huw will be reviewing shortly, is another application which is using attention data in a fascinating new way. What all of these services have in common is their use of past attention to predict what you will be interested in now and in the future. This could be extremely powerful in solving problems like information overload and content discovery in the long tail media economy (previously discussed here).

Such information is extremely valuable, and as such there is an effort to standardise the way in which it is stored, therefore making it portable. As a result, the APML (Attention Profiling mark-up language) has sprung up to try to standardise the way that “Attention Information” is formatted. This is certainly a good thing as I feel that the ‘Attention Economy’ really shines when attention information can be shared between services in a meaningful way. However, agreeing on standards and persuading companies to adopt them is notoriously difficult. It will be interesting to see how the effort develops in the coming months, and you can be assured that GizBuzz will be there to cover it!