• by Shankar Gupta , February 2, 2007

Blog search engine Technorati this week launched "Where's the Fire," a wiki-like tool that allows users to explain the backstory of Internet discussions and phenomena, and vote for the best explanations.

Technorati spokesman Aaron Krane said the tool, abbreviated as "WTF," aims to give context to users who are coming fresh to a long-running discussion online. "We've been for a long time grappling with how we can help our users understand the conversation, and ultimately, we decided why can't we just let them inform themselves?" he said.

The service allows users to submit short articles explaining Web phenomena. One article currently on the site explains why Paris Hilton has taken the spotlight this month. Users can then vote up or down explanations by others.

Technorati quietly conducted a "soft launch" Tuesday, followed by two planned service outages. The downtime led some bloggers to speculate that the launch had downed the servers, but Krane denied that.

Krane also dismissed early reports characterizing the new service as a clone of Digg, the popular collaborative news site. "A lot of those comments we observed before anyone had actually used WTF," he said.