This morning while I was checking my stats on Technorati, I noticed a minor redesign. Nope, not a revolutionary new user interface, just a couple of refinements that are still worth talking about.

Technorati now ranks blogs based on “authority”. This is the number of other blogs linking to said blog. In the past, the rank was calculated based on a combination of links/blogs, which confused a lot of people (myself included, sadly). I think this new system will make it much easier to understand.

The redesign also makes for a much cleaner and elegant interface. All the vital statistics are now grouped into a column on the left, leaving the rest of the page to display the author and recent posts. This is much better than before, where the statistics came first before the content.

Noticeably absent are the graphs that show Alexa visitor numbers and the posting frequency of blogs. I’m not sure whether this is a temporary or permanent thing, but I hope the posting frequency graphs will be back. I like seeing how often a blogger posts new content; Alexa ratings are not accurate at all, especially if most of your audience are tech-savvy or are Mac users.

On the whole, I quite like the new changes. They certainly make the site look more elegant, and also simplify the blog rankings. However, I think Technorati can further improve by indexing audio/video podcasts, not just the written word. And how about some Digg-like flash visualisation tools for the blogosphere? Mmm, yummy.