Technorati has really lost its luster; I have to agree with Mashable.

Technorati began to release its 2008 State of the Blogosphere this week, and the headlines are a yawn:

• Blogs are Pervasive and Part of Our Daily Lives
• What is a Blog? The Lines Continue To Blur
• Blogging is a truly global phenomenon
• Bloggers are not a homogenous group

It goes on.

I've tynted on it here and found many of the insights are self-apparent to PR folks who work in the digital space on a daily basis. The most interesting information I've seen that would be relevant for this blog doesn't even come from Technorati:

Larger blogs are taking on more characteristics of mainstream sites and mainstream sites are incorporating styles and formats from the Blogosphere. In fact, 95% of the top 100 US newspapers have reporter blogs

(Technorati cites the Bivings Group, which does not readily have that information available, and looks rather spammy.)

Additional nuggets include:

• 30% of bloggers have been approached to be brand advocates
• 69% of corporate bloggers are also personal bloggers

The survey has received criticism in years past, and for good reason - Technorati's methodology seems flawed, and even then, the "insights" only confirm what most people would already guess is going on in the blogosphere.

Granted, analyzing the "active blogosphere" is a tough job. Technorati defines it as:

The ecosystem of interconnected communities of bloggers and readers at the convergence of journalism and conversation.

This convergence is without a doubt happening in the blogosphere, and our clients and journalist contacts confirm it on a daily basis. But as we've seen with many Ruder Finn clients, algorithm-based analytics are often insufficient when you're measuring something that is supposed to take into account "conversation." If you rely just on Technorati's numbers, you can end up sending an energy company to Treehugger or a Republican presidential campaign to Huffington Post.

Yikes! Not a good idea.

That's why the concept of an "authority" ranking is so attractive. It gives the impression that there is some judge out there who can abort the calculations and say "Really? 30% of blog postings are in Japanese? Maybe they're spam." But unfortunately, Technorati's authority ranking does a bad job of capturing subjective input, relying on inbound links instead.

It would be great to see some truly revolutionary advancement in this field.

Have you seen any cutting edge blog measuring technology? How do you measure "conversation" and "authority?"

**UPDATE 1**

Good to know there's now a way to measure drama.

**UPDATE 2**

A major coup in web influence: Louis Gray Tops Robert Scoble in Web Presence (as measured by social media omnipresence). Thanks to @guykawasaki for the link.

**UPDATE 3**

Google releases souped up blog search engine. Mashable continues their rant against Technorati: http://mashable.com/2008/10/01/google-blog-search-new-homepage/