Technorati's emergence as a major web destination for topics in social software can be seen in google searches for the following:

• folksonomy: 3rd item
• podcasting: 6th item
• blogosphere: 9th item
• social software: 16th item

The first three results get technorati on the front page for searches that, although for niche topics, would seem to be fairly high profile. Overture, a unit of Yahoo (32% search share) reports that there were 824 searches for folksonomy, 27,658 searches for podcasting (making podcasting a little more than niche), 973 searches for blogosphere, and 1,426 searches for social software in April, 2005.

A key component to technorati's rise in search rankings on these topics is the propagation of the reltag microformat where webloggers tag their posts as belonging under certain categories and almost always link to the technorati aggregation page for the tag. To be fair, the microformat itself only requires that people point to a tag repository, the technorati repository just happens to be the most convenient. The aggregate of high pagerank bloggers like David Weinberger writing on topics like folksonomy and pointing at technorati is what has caused the technorati aggregation pages to rise in the search results.

It should be noted that technorati does not gain such search positioning on higher volume topics like “entertainment” or even “blogs”. That is likely for at least two reasons. First, these topics predate tagging and have entrenched competitors. Second, tagging is really still a niche phenomenon, so the aggregate of taggers writing on these more main stream topics may only be a drop in the bucket of all people writing on and linking to them.

Distributed folksonomy is an antidote for centralization

Recently James Farmer wrote about how he was not a supporter of folksonomy because adding metadata imposes a cost on users and does not add content beyond what is already written, and in the comments, Stephen Downes stated he was inclined to agree. However, as illustrated by the technorati example, folksonomy tags are more than just tools to add meaning. They in effect act as content aggregation points that can be used by socially entrepreneurial firms like technorati to gain a foothold in web visibility for emerging topics.

What's remarkable is the brain-dead simplicity of the technorati approach. Frankly, anybody can copy it by design, and several competing folksonomy aggregation points already are. Recently, de.lirio.us and blogmarks implemented xFolk, a microformat that builds on reltag and allows users to publish their folksonomy links own their own blogs. These competitors are putting pointers back to their own repositories at de.lirio.us and blogmarks, not technorati.

This post is not a screed against technorati. The simplicity of their vision and their execution were brilliant. The question content providers face is whether they want technorati or any other repository to act as an intervening link between them and searchers. Given that this is likely unavoidable, it is in content providers' interest to point as many tag aggregators as possible. Competitor tag aggregation points like de.lirio.us and blogmarks should use microformats like xFolk (and reltag where relevant) to make it easy for people to publish linked tags pointing back at them.

Those wondering about the utility of folksonomy for search or whether folksonomy can, in fact, lead to coherent categorizations for web navigation might be interested to study the technorati case over the past six months. Since technorati tag aggregation pages are visible to search engines, a sort of feedback loop occurs between search visibility and people's tagging behavior. Does this loop lead to coherence in tagging behavior and overall better usefulness for tags? Only time will tell.