Technorati Beta and surfacing data

The Technorati public beta has an attractive new design, but the most interesting part of it for me is the prominent placement of "most popular" news, books, and movies.

The clever feature shows books, movies, and news stories that are getting a lot of discussion in weblogs with links out to the weblog posts. Cool, fun, and useful.

In an earlier post, I wrote that, with the imminent entry of the search giants, blog search soon will become crowded. Technorati needs to differentiate themselves. How can they do that?

[Technorati is] swimming in an ocean of information. If they can surface the right data to the right people, bubble up the news people need, then they'd have something truly unusual.

This feature is an excellent example. Great work from the Technorati team.

[via David Sifry]