WTF is Technorati up to?

Blog search engine Technorati has launched a new feature called "Where's The Fire?" that allows users to write explanations of topics or search terms that are floating around the blogosphere. The Technorati community can then vote on the best submissions (ala Digg), which will appear alongside search results and the top searches list.

Obviously, like Digg itself, the submission process is open to spam, which Technorati hopes the voting system will help weed out. Having only just launched, the network effects haven't kicked in and the WTF for the term Barack Obama, for example, just points to somebody's blog post and isn't particularly useful. Technorati themselves acknowledge the risk:

Here at Technorati HQ, we know that we're taking a pretty risky step - we're putting our highest-value real estate - the topmost search result - in the hands of our community. This is a big social experiment to see if people will work together to help create something great and useful, and will use the voting system to push up the best explanations to the top.