Technorati & PRNewswire Deal: Just 'Cuz It's Easy Doesn't Mean It Ain't Kinda' Cool
Earlier this week, Technorati and PRNewswire announced a deal that "for the first time (allows) readers of press releases (to) track online conversations in the blogosphere directly from press releases." In other words, the "Technorati This" button will be integrated within the press release.
This is both Big News and Not-So-Big News.
It's Not-So-Big News in that it's Not A Big Deal --- not "technically," anyway. Anyone savvy enough to pull down a press release directly from the PRNewswire site is likely more than capable of also running a quick T'rati search on the news. This integration simply saves a step.
It may also be considered Not-So-Big News if the rumors are true that that this collaboration will "scrub" the results of the integrated T'rati search. But I harbor serious doubts about that rumor. Although I could see why it might be attractive for PRN to offer corporate clients a "scrubbed" Technorati search, I really doubt that that's even possible. I also doubt that Sifry would agree to such a thing. The rumor is further disproven when you see that the T'rati search about the news already includes at least one negative reaction.
But, it's also true that there are some negative posts about the deal that do not show up in the T'rati search (like this one). "Misses" beg the question, "What else went missing?" If the T'rati search about the T'rati/PRN integration is itself flawed, I am concerned about suggesting this feature to clients. My guess is that these are unintentional search flaws that will be remedied in due course.
In any event, I am a PRN fan; I know Dave Armon; he's serious about Social Media. Which leads to the Big News:
"This marks the first time Technorati has entered into a partnership with a commercial news distribution company, and will help establish a strong link between two of the most important tools in the communications mix --- announcements via press releases and reactions from bloggers."
Ultimately it doesn't matter how "easy" it is to enable this technical functionality. What this deal represents is the growing respectability of Social Media. PRN is the grandaddy of Establishment newswires. This deal sends one more, strong and clarion signal to Corporate America that the voice of the people cannot be ignored.
Tags: technorati, prnewswire, businesswire, prweb, marketwire, dave+armon, david+sifry
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Comments
I can state unequivocally that Technorati is not doing any "scrubbing" or allowing any type of editing or changes to our results as a part of this deal - you get taken to the results page on technorati that shows you all of the blogs that we know that are linking to that URL.
If there are missing links it would be because of an indexing bug or the like - and I'm perfectly willing to admit that we do occasionally have spidering errors and the like.
However, I'm somewhat puzzled by your statement that some negative posts are missed. The post in question at http://www.davidunleashed.com/2007/01/16/pr-newswire-news-about-nothing/ does not have a link to the press release, near as I can tell. Rather, the negative post appears to link to another blog post here: http://beaulaurier.net/blog/prweb-gets-some-competition-from-pr-newswire/2007/01/15/ which is a negative reaction to the release - which does, incidentally, link to the release and which shows up in the Technorati search results.
Near as I can tell, the system is working as designed. It would be a great feature for us to add links to posts that link to URLs (recursively ad infinitum) so that you could see all of the conversation around a topic in one place, but that's not what we do today, nor is it what we announced in the deal with PR Newswire.
Hope that clears things up, and please do continue to keep us on our toes! We know we're not perfect by any means, and are always looking for ways to improve and make Technorati more useful to you, so keep the feedback coming!
Thanks.
Dave
Posted by: David Sifry | January 18, 2007 11:08 AM
Todd,
As much as I think a certain someone needs a bath, I can assure you, I am not the one doing the scrubbing. :)
The Technorati button on PR Newswire press releases searches only the press release link and retrieves blog posts that include that link directly. If a blog post, positive or negative, does not link directly to the unique url of the press release, it will not appear in the search results. As the partnership develops further, we will work out ways to broaden the search, but for now, we feel this initial step is pretty groundbreaking – again, we are linking press releases directly to posts about the release. It's a great way for press release readers to get more context around the news they are reading, and a great tracking device for issuers of releases who are interested in the conversation around their news.
Best,
Dave
Posted by: Dave Armon, COO, PR Newswire | January 18, 2007 12:05 PM
Dear Dave & Dave -
I am sorry that you both felt the need to defend the functionality - as I noted, if there ARE any errors or misses, I am sure that they'll be worked out. Overall I think it's a good thing, and I think that that was pretty clear in my post.
I did note that one blogger had a problem with PRN's use of "frames" when it came to linking to releases. Not sure if that's an issue because I saw the T'rati/PRN release in its "flat" HTML form... I leave such matters to the technologists, of which you both have plenty on staff.
I agree with you, Dave (Sifry), that it would be great to be able to extend the search beyond "just" the release - but then again, isn't that "just" a T'rati tag? i.e., it's one thing to see conversation about a Technorati/PRN deal, quite another to simply add the "PRNewswire" tag to a release and thus see any-and-all conversations about PRN (some about the new deal, some not).
One other question that many folks may have down-the-road is about the length of this exclusivity. I am sure MW and BW would want to add this functionality, too?
Anyway, thanks for checking in. You've just proven that the technology works AND you've provided a great example of how corporations need to participate in these conversations.
Posted by: Todd Defren | January 18, 2007 02:12 PM
Providing a list of blogs linking only to a specific prnewswire.com URL is inadequate to capture the full breadth of the conversation. Blogs could link to the PR Newswire release on any of hundreds of URLs all over the web.
Much better, I think, for companies to manually add links to Technorati keyword search results pages. Such as this one.
But why do we need full text releases anyway? If we didn't issue full text and instead just used the wires to distribute links to full text releases on our own sites, then almost all links from blogs would be to our sites and to a single URL, in which case we wouldn't need to manually code each Technorati link to capture a fuller breadth of the conversation.
Too much conventional echo chamber thinking going on...
Posted by: Dominic Jones | January 18, 2007 03:47 PM