Dave Sifry on Technorati Weblog announces a new Public Beta:
I’m pleased to announce the launch of the public beta of this major redesign of the Technorati service. We’ve been listening to your feedback, and we hope we’ve reflected that in this release. This is a beta. So, if you have feedback, please tell us because we want to know what is of value to you, our users. We’ve made a big step with this release. Having said that, we also know we have more improvements to make and we’re working hard to implement them. Here are some of the highlights of this beta release:
* We’ve improved the user experience, making Technorati accessible to more people and, specifically, people who are new to blogging. We’ve tried to make it very simple to understand what Technorati is all about, and make it easy to understand how we’re different from other search engines.
* We’ve learned from the incredible success of tags, and brought some of the those same features into search, as well as expanding tag functionality. Now, if your search matches a tag, we bring in photos and links from flickr, furl, delicious, and now buzznet as well.
* We now have more powerful advanced search features. You can now click the “Options” link beside any search box for power searching options.
* We’ve added more personalization. Sign in, and you’ll see your current set of watchlists, claimed blogs, and profile info, right on the homepage, giving you quick access to the stuff you want as quickly as possible.
* New Watchlist capabilities have been added. For example, you no longer need a RSS reader to watch your favorite searches. Now you can view all of your favorite searches on one page. Of course, you can still get your watchlists via RSS, and it is even easier to create new watchlists. You can also get RSS feeds for tagged posts, just check the bottom of each page of tag results!