Technorati Gives Blog Network Blogcritics A Much Needed Facelift

Technorati has fully redesigned Blogcritics, a seven-year old blog
network that the media company acquired last August, in an effort to
drive more traffic to the site. We originally wrote about Blogcritics
in 2005. Blogcritics currently is a community of 3,300 writers who
have published more than 84,000 articles, providing bloggers an entry
point to publish their content to a more widely-visited site. The
content on the site hasn't changed much; it's will simply be packaged
in a sleeker, more user-friendly interface. Currently, the site's
design and interface is bland and features very little in terms of
images.

The new design, which will be rolled out at 1 AM PST tonight, features
a new logo, a more colorful interface, and is well-organized. The site
contains a new feature "ObamaNation," that will analyze the impact
President Obama is having on pop culture. It also allows users to
follow their favorite writers by listing all of the content a writer
has created both on and off the Blogcritics platform. All in all, it
is a big improvement in terms of the way the site looks and feels.
Blogcritics, which is similar to Salon's Open Salon, draws about 1
million unique monthly visitors, according to Google Analytics. The
site hasn't increased traffic since its acquisition last summer—the
site had about 1 million monthly uniques at that point as well, so
this is clearly an effort to spruce up the blog community to drive
more traffic. The site currently runs ads completely through
Technorati's ad network.