Time to boycott Technorati?

Are the Technorati people deliberately making their site difficult to navigate to increase advertising revenue? For the last few weeks the Technorati site has become very difficult to navigate.

I've found Technorati useful mainly when I've just blogged about something, or am thinking about blogging about something, to see what other bloggers have had to say on that topic recently. If others have already said it better than I could, I just make a short post with links to the best blog articles on the topic, and that makes it easier for me to find them again. Or if I disagree with them, then I change the way I planned to write my article to say why.

But the Technorati people have now changed their menu system, which makes the whole thing much more difficult to navigate, and I've found that I have to go outside Technorati to my own bookmarks to find what I'm looking for, or even to get back to my home page on Technorati. I've sometimes had to do a Google search to find stuff on Technorati, because the Technorati menu system is now so screwed up.

An example: one of my interests is language and usage. So I sometimes blog about these, and recently I blogged about eggcorns on my other blog. One particular eggcorn, which is rapidly gaining in popularity, is hippocracy.

Uising Technorati searches, one can find who is blogging about hippocracy, or about eggcorns, or which blogs mention these things in passing. If you didn't know what these words mean, Technorati has a "wtf" page, and invites people two write these. But they are now the things that are virtually impossible to find from within Technorati. I happened to write the wtf page on hippocracy, but to find it, you need to do a Google search from outside Technorati itself, and even that may not work. You can search the Technorati menus for hours and never find what you are looking for. Perhaps they are doing that deliberately, as all that fruitless searching probably increases their advertising revenue.

Surely a decent navigation system is one of the first things one needs to learn about Web page design? The Technorati people can't be that inexperienced, so it's hard not to see it as a deliberate ploy. Is it perhaps time for bloggers to boycott Technorati?