I got a Technorati account a long time ago, but have hardly used it in the last several months. Exploring Technorati in the last couple of days, via the discovery exercises, I have a better idea of why my use of it dropped. Purely on an aesthetic level, I find the site wanting, with its tiny type and bright green font. And, I find the sidebars on many screens intrusively large, crowding out primary search results and necessitating paging forward to read more than a couple of headlines.
In terms of content, it seems that the most popular political stories there have a decidedly conservative slant. I don't know enough about how Technorati works to know whether this is simply a result of the political leanings of the people who use the site, or those who run it. Of course, those two factors could be mutually reinforcing, as well. That is, a slight political slant on the part of the people who run it would attract users who agreed with their politics, which would cause certain stories to rise in popularity. In any event, "Rising Posts and Stories" under both "news" and "blogs" seem to be a mixture of anti-Obama punditry, general-interest stories (like the death of director John Hughes), and computer-related posts. I'm interested in technical news where it's especially groundbreaking and well-written, but the couple of stories that appear on a cursory search don't look especially compelling.
When I tried using the tag "libraries," only about a third of the headlines that appeared seemed to lead to stories that actually have libraries as their primary subject matter. This may be partly due to the readership of a technically-oriented site like this using "library" in a different sense from the one I think of as the primary definition, but it does make the service less useful to me.
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