[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
When Technorati initially launched their Digg-like feature WTF, which stands for Where's The Fire (yeah, right), reviews and opinions were mixed, and for a good reason. WTF's concept and, to some extent, its implementation, were vague. It was a service meant to be simple, but yet it was hard to explain what it's about in less than 10 sentences, and that's not good. However, with the recent redesign, WTF fares much better, and definitely deserves another look.
The idea of Digg meets Technorati was great, since Technorati wasn't that great at exposing good content from their vast blog index. The logical way to do it was simply let people point to blog articles and let users vote for those that are best. Alas, for some reason Technorati had decided to complicate matters. The stories on WTF were envisioned not as links with a short description, but as mini-blog entities on their own. Couple this with a slightly confusing organization of the page, and it was enough to make everyone forget about WTF for a while.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
So, what has changed after yesterday's redesign? First of all, WTF is now more prominent and visible; it's obviously meant to be one of the most important features at Technorati. We would prefer to see the actual WTF stories directly on the front page, though, but the folks at Technorati decided to just throw a couple of random popular blogs there.
The actual WTF page is now much more similar to Digg and other social networking sites. The standard structure of popular stories, recent stories, your bookmarks and the option to submit a new story is broken only by the addition of WTF topics. WTF topics are, basically, single tags, which help organize the content better. This is why you should chose your topic carefully when submitting a new WTF, because a good topic can increase its visibility.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
The process of submitting a WTF is pretty much the same as submitting a story to Digg, Reddit, or Netscape. Choose a topic, title, and a description, and you're good to go. But, notice that "link" is missing.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
This goes with the philosophy of WTFs being able to stand on their own, and not be just links to other articles. You know what we think about this? Screw it. If you're going to submit a WTF, do it as you would on any other social content site: write a short paragraph, and link it to the real article. This is what works, this is what makes WTF useful. Luckily, you can still add the link without adding any HTML tags: simply copy and paste it into your WTF, and you're done. Bear in mind that you have the option of adding multiple links, but you should use it with moderation; you don't want spam people with irrelevant links, now do you?
Also, be careful when submitting links to your own articles. From what we've seen, it's not immediately ostracized by the Technorati community, but as with all social networking sites, it's best to do it in moderation.
[img src="" caption="" credit="" alt=""]
Lastly, here's the single most important thing about WTF: people aren't using it that much yet. You think this is a bad thing? Think again. Technorati has a lot of traffic, and the competition for getting your WTF up there on the front page is not nearly as fierce as on Digg or Reddit. Some items on the top of WTF's hot list are several days old, which means that writing an interesting WTF can yield great visibility and probably solid traffic for your WTF.