Technorati WTF?

Before you exclaim aloud 'how rude!' you should know that WTF stands for 'Where's the Fire?'. Technorati have began a service much like Digg. They have described it as a "a big social experiment to see if people will work together to help create something great and useful, and will use the voting system to push up the best explanations to the top. " If it works this will be great for bloggers with good content (as they will receive some targeted traffic especially if they get on the front page) and for people browsing the archives for information. Providing people vote honestly the articles will be ordered fairly, rewarding the hard working bloggers and punishing the spammers.

I for one believe it will be a success. I have already posted a few of articles from this blog on it. I do have one nagging issue with it and that is that It was surprisingly easy to submit articles. You are given a lot of freedom (perhaps too much) even to the extent of choosing to start your own category just for your post. On other similar sites this has been frustratingly difficult because you need to 'apply' for a new category. On WTF however you can just type one in and BAM its a new category. Whether this is a good or a bad thing remains to be seen. I am not especially worried about spammers but about honest mistakes being make. For example, if you submit your article and label its category 'football' it will end up in a different category to an article categorised as 'soccer'. There are lots of other circumstances where a category could be slightly different and end up dividing content. I am unaware of how Technorati are going to prevent this. Perhaps they are only allowing new categories to be created like this because it is still in very early stages and will remove this ability once the 'directory' is more developed.

Check out WTF