The father of a friend is in hospital in these days, yesterday I heard a some horror stories about a local hospital.

This morning (this morning!) I was thinking about a web site were people could tell their good or bad experiences about health services.

Later today (today!) I found out that my friends at Heashift have announced today Patient Opinion:

a new service that tells you what other people are saying about your local health services and lets you share your story with others

In this post Matt is discussing about Technorati and what's wrong with it and how it could be fixed.

I started wondering: what do I really want from Technorati?

First: I want to know who is linking me. This is the feature I use most (actually it's the feature I would use if it worked, but most of the time I don't get a reply and when I do it's not always relevant - I know that they know that it's broken, I'm patiently waiting :-).

Second: I want to know who is talking about me, my company, my products. This should be the real killer app: in a world full of blogs companies want to have a good control of their on-line reputation. From this POV the fact that Technorati is trying to index every single post out there is very important.

Third: Technorati is in the position to better understand what's going on in the blogosphere, from their privileged observation point they can provide interesting data. David Sifry's State of the Blogosphere reports are quite interesting, maybe all this information could also be used by others for research purposes.

Now am I not expecting from Technorati?

Top 100s list are cool, but since I'm not in any of them they are bad for my ego ;-). I do understand that ranking system could be good for the advertising business but maybe others could concentrate on this.

I'm not expecting Technorati to find stuff for me. I don't believe much in this whole thing about suggesting readings that I wouldn't otherwise have found. Matt writes:

I don't read most of the "top 100" because they're not interesting to me. I want a heads up on new blogs which are interesting to me, i.e. the other end of the spectrum from the 'boing boing's of this world. Why do I only come across them by chance?

Hmm... do we really come across interesting stuff by chance? In most cases I come across interesting stuff trough my network of "informants" in my aggregator. That's the great thing about the blogosphere: having access to this huge network of eyes and brains. How can Technorati tap into this process? I would rather expect features in this game from a centralized aggregator such as Bloglines.

Oh, and then there's the tagging thing. I like tagging, we have a groupware product that is based on tagging. What work on personal or group level doesn't always work globally. While wild social tagging works on Flickr, I have not started to see the advantages as far as blogging is concerned. Anyway Technorati gave huge visibility to tagging and this will definitely help all of us getting to a better web sooner.