A Consuming Experience

If you've visited blogosphere search engine Technorati in the last couple days, you'll have noticed their new 33-question survey (and if you haven't, now you know about it!).

It's open for a "few days" so take it if you want to have your say. The box for "Do you have any suggestions for how Technorati could better serve your needs or those of the people you know?" is in question 33, so even if you are dying to give your comments or suggestions (e.g. about the problems with tag pages, or searches failing because of a high volume of requests), you need to work your way through the other 32 questions first - but they're pretty quick to answer.

As Niall Kennedy explains on the Technorati Blog, there are a bunch of demographic profiling and visit type/frequency questions for the benefit of Technorati's advertisers, including how many of their visitors blog, how often they post, do they tag their posts, what other blog-related services they use, are they a Technorati member, have they claimed their blog on Technorati, how did they hear about Technorati, how often do they visit and which services they use (e.g. Mini, RSS, watchlists, checking blog ranking etc), and their general view of Technorati and its ease of use.

The other questions are interesting to the extent they may give hints about Technorati's future direction, or at least the way they're currrently thinking about their possible future direction. For instance there are a number of questions about people's use of Technorati - to monitor comments about themselves or their blog, or about their company or business or clients, or community/world news; and to what extent they use Technorati for their job/business purposes.

There are queries to gauge interest in seeing mainstream media content alongside blog content, and user interest in searching contacts, reviews, calendar events etc (i.e. standardisation of microformats for those, and the whole structured blogging thing - though it seems to me that the main issue is going to be how they compare against Google Base and its searchable flexible databases for reviews, and yes calendar events etc etc, and it will be interesting to see how all that plays out). And of course, they want to know to what extent users would be willing to pay for advanced services whether for personal or business purposes; maybe they're thinking of charging for business use.

I suspect Technorati are unlikely to publish the results, not in full at least, but you never know - I for one would be very interested to see a summary.

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Technorati Tags: Technorati, survey, market research, marketing, advertising, search engines, search, searching, Improbulus, A Consuming Experience, Consuming Experience

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