Technorati now hiring bloggers (and biting the hand that feeds them?)

Technorati used to be the darling of the Blogging industry. Unfortunately they have lost some of their shine in these past years with declining market share, bugs and downtime, and an unclear strategy for the future.

Or so it seems.

Traffic seems to be steady at around 3 million uniques a month which is not bad for a blog but not good enough for a search engine. There are several ways to fix their torn image and the many software bugs plaguing the site.

Technorati seems to have chosen the least expected one: they are becoming a blog.

Yesterday a lot of people received an invitation to start blogging for technorati.

Here it is:

Become a Technorati Writer!

Technorati is entering into the next phase of our evolution: original content.

Beginning in October, Technorati will feature original content on the site written by bloggers just like you! This is an amazing opportunity to give your writing vast exposure, become known as an expert in your field/s of interest, and to join a vibrant writer community.

Get in on the ground floor by signing up via the Technorati Contact Page.
Select the “New: Technorati Writer Signup” option from the “Message Type” drop-down box.
You will receive information and writing instructions as we get closer to launch date.
We very much look forward to working with you!

On that form there is another bit of information:

If you are interested in publishing your articles on any of Technorati’s channels, please include a link to your blog (or your writing samples) in the URL field. In the message, be sure to mention your areas of interest and any other nuggets about yourself you want to share. In the coming weeks you will receive  additional information from Technorati’s editors.

So what is Technorati planning? Another Google Knol or Mahalo? Whatever their plans are its a risky strategy to compete with the same blogs you are tracking. I would have also appreciated it if Technorati would have focused on improving their current services first.

Personal rant:

The bug that annoys me the most is our double listing. When we switched from our thenextweb.ORG domain to the current thenextweb.COM domain somewhere something got screwed up at Technorati. If you visit our profile now at Technorati you will either see our old rank, at 46,590 or our new rank at 202. Reload 10 times to see the difference yourself.

The Ranking seems to be the only really interesting feature at Technorati for us right now and our rank even helps us sell our advertising. In this case it probably just scares away potential advertisers though as it just doesn’t work to ask people to reload a page ten times to see actual results. Unfortunately Technorati hasn’t responded to our numerous requests to fix this.