Technorati released three new features recently: Filter By Authority, Favorites and Reading Lists/OPML for Blog Finder – and while they sure are nice they are also kinda lame.

Filter By Authority gives you on the result of a search a little slider, which lets you restrict the results to blogs with (any, a little, some, a lot) authority.

Favorites lets you add up to 50 Blogs and aggregates the recent entries of those. You also can restrict your searches to them.

Reading Lists/OPML for Blog Finder lets you subscribe (see the little button labeled ‘OPML’ at the bottom of the page) to the 20 most authorative blogs on any topic/tag (e.g.: web 2.0).

All three tools will help you, if you don’t use a feedreader (which is emulated by Favorites), if you want to eliminate noise (trading this against the risk of missing potentially interesting stuff which stayed under the radar of the popular blogs) or if you just want to read what most others are also reading on a topic.

I wonder if this is really the best Technorati can come up with. They can access an ocean of data. They have indexed all blogs out there, they have all the links in between them and out, they’ve got all the tags, they do know a lot. The only thing they are exploiting is authority based on backlinks (which obviously is the best indicator for interestingness the industry has so far.)

If you are new to a subject, checking out the 20, 50, 100 most popular blogs definitively will give you a head start, but once you’ve checked them out, you’ll have picked your favorites and read them anyways (or not). There is no added value, if Technorati reinforces the visibility of those already visible. I’m really missing tools for digging in the longer end of the tail.