Global Voices Online

Argentinian native and Spanish citizen Martin Varsavsky writes on his Spanish blog [ES]: “[Technorati founder, David Sifry] showed me what he is really going to do and how he is going to launch it. And I suggested a modification that he liked a lot, but that it will take a couple days. So I suppose that the service will come out on Friday. On my English blog I didn't post it (although it is easy to translate, there is a linguistic barrier between the two blogs), but here I'm going to talk about it at least a little. It's an improvement to Technorati that resembles Meneame and Wikipedia.” But before Varsavsky got to spill his secret news, Steve Rubel of Micropersuasion showed a screenshot of the new feature that, get this, was to be called “WTF” or, so they say, “Where's the Fire.” As it so happens, Steve Rubel is the senior vice president of Edelman, the world's largest independent PR firm and he is helping form a partnership between Technorati and Edelman. According to his posting, however: “I spotted this with my own two eyes and didn't get advance notice.” From Rubel's blog, the news drifted around the tech echo chamber including Michael Arrington's widely read TechCrunch. Arrington, like many, notes that the new feature, which had been live at technorati.com/wtf is no longer available, which leads Juan Luis of Technorantes to assume [ES] that the good people of Technorati are looking for a better name than WTF. Moral of the story? Pre-release leaks make for good publicity.