In the last few days, Technorati launched what the blogosphere called “their digg clone” – the “What’s The Fire?” service. In just a sentence, this service allows Technorati users to post stories and let those stories to be voted by other users. The most popular will become the most visited, obviously.

Of course, this move had started a little buzz on the world. Are they going to be better than Digg? Are they going to add something new to the clone? Is the name for good? After all, wtf, as well as other hundreds of net abbreviations, such as “asl pls”, share a very precise synapse in the brain of 99% of the net citizens. Does Technorati knows that? If so, they are even counting on the sound of the name to make their service a hit?

A lot of questions, and a lot of comments. I saw 2 interesting posts related to this, both very early, before the actual launch. Darren Rowse from problogger.net and John Chow from johnchow.com are both talking about that. The viewpoint of each is pretty interesting…

Darren Rowse has chosed a rather neutral approach, almost as a “journalist blogger” that presents the facts and does not judge them. John Chow, on the other hand, as an entrepreneur, already thought at a domain name for sale, which tells a lot about their sales skills. Not a surprise that he made more than 3000 USD in his 5th – yes, only the 5th! – month of blogging.

By curiosity I tried the service by posting a blurb about the iPhone and GTD, one of my favourite topics. In one day I’ve got two votes – the other one that counts at this time, the third, is shameless mine . How much does this represents? I don’t really have an idea. It’s very early to predict the evolution of such a service, knowing also that the market here is very volatile, digg and reddit being only two of the biggest and oldest competitors here. It’s true that Technorati will try to exploit the blogging niche, not the overall “news” category, but it’s hard to tell anyway. The critical mass that a service need to attract in order to become a hit it’s, in my opinion, completely unpredictable.

Until further news, I got this on my watchlist.