When is authority not authority? When it’s on Technorati.

It seems to me that there’s something misleading about Technorati’s authority rating, at least in the name. Authority, to me, suggests that an individual has some level of expertise, some demonstrable proof of knowledge of a given topic. Sometimes, but not always, it includes recognition by others. But this isn’t what authority means on Technorati.

From their help document:

The best way to increase your Technorati Authority is to write things that are interesting to other bloggers so they’ll link to you.

Interesting is not authority, interesting is, well, interesting. It is as if they have conused interesting writing with authoritative writing. Or worse, potentially it is popularity confused with authority.

I realize the term authority is probably being used as part of some marketing scheme somewhere by Technorati, but from an information retrieval point of view in an educational setting (which a library is, at least in part) it sets up exactly the kind of problem I have heard librarians and educators complaining about – people do not know how to identify an authoritative source.

If I were using Technorati in a reference setting, I would offer the searcher the same caveats I would offer about Google, Wiki, and other similar sources. And then show them the subscription databases for comparison.

Now, there are some good points to Techorati:

  • A corporate library might search to see what people are saying about the company or a product to prepare information for other managers
  • For school assignments, finding interesting (there’s that word again) posts about current events is easy
    • In a library setting, this offers the opportunity to teach good information literacy skills
  • For bloggers, it’s a quick and easy way to see what others are talking about on your niche topic – either for post ideas or to contribute comments to other blogs

I’ll probably use Technorati for both the first and last points (I don’t work in a library and have little opportunity to teach information literacy otherwise). What I won’t use it for is finding authoritative writing on a particular topic, without doing further assessment of the author’s qualifications. Like Wiki articles, it’s more of a jumping off point than a destination.