Well, it was pointed out to me that my sample size was too small with the last one so I have just tried with another 20 links from http://weblogs.com/ and it is even worse.

Every one of the 20 links was a spam/adfarm site. Every single one. I was watching as the last entry made here was pinged to them, but there was no mention of this site, so I can only think they have some arcane method of deciding who makes the home page and who doesn’t.

These are some examples from the recent crop:

http://www.supercoolsearch.com/The_Sopranos.html – how did this get on as a blog? Following my 20 links (all opened in new tabs so I could make sure I didn’t miss any), I had a look at some random ones. It seems that http://www.supercoolsearch.com/ get mentioned every four or five times. Not a blog in site there.

http://www.veryfastsearch.com/search.php?aid=571&keyword=Civilization got mentioned as a blog (Called Buzz!Civilization) which strikes me as a pure lie. It is nothing but adfarm.

http://www.18r7webhosting.info/bmresourcesaab0/animal-background-desktop-free.php is down as a “Free stuff” blog. Again, pure adfarm. I am amazed Google put ads there. An example of the sites “content” is:

Latest News and Information Plus News from around the net…

published a rebuttal to the original work by Bart Trents, which generally concluded the Animal Background Desktop Free analysis, though far from its infancy, is not 100% worthy of approval. “What…'”, offered ignorantly Laura Williamson, “You actually believe that’ I am really shocked and so are the people of New Rochelle. All the evidence points to Animal Background Desktop Free supremacy in the consumer market, and on top of that, Animal Background

If google pay out any advertising fees to that site, well actually it wouldn’t surprise me.

http://occupational-therapy-salary-bis.extolled-cool-links.info/ tries to look like a blog, but is in fact another adfarm.

http://winecellarhq.blogspot.com/ has some potential for being real but I am not sold yet.

http://educationinfoguide.com/blogs/online-education-for-military-spouses and http://weddingplanningadvice.info/blogs/tips-on-planning-a-wedding/41569/ strike me as being nothing more than “cunning ploys” but they may be legit blogs. Nah, on second thoughts they are just as spammy.

Maybe I am just timing things badly and normally all the posts are 100% legit. I doubt it though.

We live in a time where people keep going on about how there are a zillion blogs and still ten new ones are made every millionth of a second. This is often trumpeted out as being a “Good Thing” and a sign about how people are getting the chance to speak. It kind of sounds like blogs give a voice to the “Little Guy.”

The reality is far from this.

Most new blogs, unless they are sponsored by a large corporation or are the product of some “famous” person (this includes well known geeks by the way), vanish into the swamp that is the blogosphere.

Far from your blog being the chance for you to set the world right, 99.9% of the time it will just be somewhere for you to while away time while getting things off your chest (like this one).

There is some advantage to this in that it keeps a record of what you thought in the past when you get old, cranky and want to reminisce, but the blog is not a force for democracy.

I’ve moaned about Technorati enough for a while so I will move elsewhere. Take http://weblogs.com/ as an example. It has “see whats changing in real time” option where you can see the new or updated blogs go past. It shows the most recent 10 and each new & updated blog gets about 1 second on the page before it becomes so old its gone.

Out of curiousity, I tried some of these. Now this is not a representative sample as I only clicked on about 20 in total but at least 10 were content free, pure spam sites. At least 10. A few (four) were like this site – http://fha-mortgage-interest-rate.officialfha.com/ and I am not 100% sure it is a spam site but I have strong suspicions.

Some (three) were like http://www.bloggersurfers.net/web-search-engine-optimization/ which while not an obvious spam site, strikes me as being a little ad heavy / content light.

The remaining three seemed OK to me, but two were in Chinese so I have no idea what the content was like.

Overall, 1 in 20 of the new & updated blogs had any content. That site had at best a 5% chance of getting a hit with each new post. It is sad, but there are some great blogs out there with funny and informative content which will never, ever see the light of day.

Very democratic.

At last I have found it. Live Writer, for all its other chocolately goodness just can not seem to get a trackback ping to work. It seems that of the last couple of posts I made with it, even entering URLs into the trackback area, ignored this useful bit of blogging.

Going in and manually editing the trackbacks didn’t help much though, so there is a chance it is WordPads fault and Live Writer is innocent.

We can’t allow that though….

Amazingly there are only two blogs listed with Technorati tags about the Wire (This isn’t one of them) After a fair bit of searching i found the Wire bits on http://mattzollerseitz.blogspot.com/2006/09/different-voices-diversity-in-wires.html and there is some interesting stuff there.

Such as the idea that the Wire isn’t very popular because most of its characters are black (with some % estimates by various people, suchas Vance Cureton, from something called the Reading Post) or that its characters are all violent and hostile. Uh? The Wire characters cross every level of society and exhibit every shade of moral failing and virtue.

Anyway, it’s a very good blog post, with a quotation from sociology professor that I want to copy here, but, in fear of committing a double plagiarism, I’ve linked to the source.

It tells you that producer Ed Burns, “served both as a homicide detective in the real Baltimore police department and as a teacher in the city’s public schools” No surprise there but informative. It supports the feeling that its realiism is well founded in someone’s experience.

And it provides the fantastic fact that Stringer Bell is played by a British actor. Wow.

Oddly, technorati is updating its database with records from other sites(*), so the only thing I can conclude is that either Technorati doesn’t like this site or the WordPress/RPC/Ping Form/Pingomatic things aren’t working.

What are the odds of all four ping methods failing?

(*) Even a site which has no content and is updated once every blue moon has been indexed faster than this one – and it links here!

By the way – this seems to be a recurring theme:

http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/10/28/technorati-missing-posts/
http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/10/28/technorati-bad-as-ever/
http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/09/30/blog-search-with-blogger/
http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/07/25/technorati-update-time/
http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/07/25/technorati-oddness/
http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/06/19/is-technorati-pointless/
http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/06/14/technorati-ranking/

Well, in this bizzaro world where I am singing the praise of Microsoft products and falling over in the face of a “Web 2.0” package (i.e. Technorati being terrible), it should come as no surprise my feelings toward iTunes change on an hourly basis.

Normally I like iTunes and my iPod is heavily used – however when I had a crazy idea to update all my files with the proper album artwork things went heavily down hill.

iTunes does this almost automatically – however this means when the system cant find the album it leaves you with a blank space. Now, call me old fashioned but “Manic Monday” from The Bangles should not be hard to find – yet it is no where in the iTunes database. Shocking really.

Still, this is the 21st century so I should expect all technology to be pervasive and random.

Despite my complaints about Technorati recently and MS generally, this is really interesting Blog software. It actually does make it easy to include a variety of things – for example, I am going to search Flickr for some pictures of Stonehenge and so that people can be aware of the place, I have put in an overhead shot from MS Virtual Earth. (Below).

In addition to the overhead shot, in case people don’t know how to get to Stonehenge, I can also add a map

This is pretty cool as you can see – the map works, although confusingly the pushpin is centred on the object, not pointing to it. Instinct would say the bottom of the pin is where the place should be, but this is only the case if you massively zoom in.

As would be expected from a Microsoft package there are some glitches with layout and rendering (especially if you try to use complex CSS in your blog) but for about 90% of the blogs I have read Live Writer is perfect.

I will continue to see what else it does and try and identify where it will go wrong…

del.icio.us tags: Stonehenge, Megaliths, Microsoft, Live Writer, Virtual Earth

As previously mentioned, there are now 16 posts since last Friday (which is currently the last time Technorati thinks this blog was updated) and none have been registered. This is despite the blog software running the rpc-ping protocols as suggested by Technorati.

Seems like a space in the market for a replacement service.

I am still playing with Windows Live Writer and, as I have now installed the Flickr plug in, I thought I would put it to some good use. So a quick search on Flickr produced this image of Corfe Castle. Overall it looks pretty good, the search facilities are brilliant but there seems to be no easy way of showing attribution of the images, which may be a problem down the line.

How do other people solve this? Do they skip the attributions?

Well, despite my recent surprised happiness with MS products the shocking issues with Technorati remain.

Almost two hours after the last post on this blog was made (the one linked above), the technorati entry says the blog was last updated six days ago. Shocking. Even after running the ping service here, at Pingomatic and at Technorati, the last weeks worth of posts seem to not exist.

Using the Technorati Ping I got this reply:

Ping Us

Thanks for the Ping!

Technorati will now check www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog for new content. You can bookmark this page and return to it to notify Technorati of updates.

Seems like barefaced lies to me. So much for the Blogosphere making everyones opinions equal.

Loathe though I am to admit it, there is little chance I can continue to deny Microsoft are actually capable of producing some good, free, software.

Wow.

Yes. I had to sit down after that as well.

The good bit of software is Windows Live Writer – it is designed to be used with MSN Spaces (Microsoft’s version of blogging software, late and playing catch up seems pretty routine for MS).

Despite it’s Microsoft pedigree, this is actually a good bit of beta software. This post is being written with it, so it certainly connects to rival blog software easily enough.

Without raving about it too much, it makes posting to the blog somewhat like a MS Office experience – easy and feels “familiar.” It comes with plug ins for flickr and tagging protocols. It allows you insert Windows Live maps, pictures and the like. So far, I cant fault it. Hopefully this will change with time…

Well worth the cost of downloading this bit of software. 🙂