It turns out that WTFs are supposed to be definitions. I quote, after changing the spelling of explanations:

On January 31, 2007 Technorati released a new feature to help people to get explanations on things they see popping up in the blogosphere

This post explains that WTFs are supposed to share your knwledge and links. So far, so good, sounds like Wikipedia in blog format. The Technorati twist is that voting is used to push definitions up to the top. Technorati encourages you to add to the collection and get your “friends” to vote

If you think that you’ve got a better explanation than the one that shows up on top of Technorati search results for a term, no worries, just go and write your own, and get your friends to vote for it. WTF uses a special time weighted voting system that means that the most popular recent WTFs will show up on top of the page.

Maybe it’s terrible cynicism but doesn’t get your “friends” to vote for it mean, in practice, “Send in votes from the dozens of fake blogs you’ve set up to spam your blog to a high enough position to become visible”

Technorati claims this is an experiment. A test may be unfair, given it’s only been going for two days. But, who says the blogworld is fair? So, here goes.

On that very page there is a list of Most Recent WTFs. I’m pasting the whole thing here.

• WTF? Branding a Generic Term (1 blurb)
• 2000 Bloggers (1 blurb)
• congoo (1 blurb)
• ESB (1 blurb)
• Howie Carr (1 blurb)
• avid Hosting (1 blurb)
• Drug Companies Own Texas (1 blurb)
• TV and Radio (1 blurb)
• genocide intervention network (1 blurb)
• genocide intervention (1 blurb)

Who needs TV and radio to be defined? And Drug Companies own texas? This is blatantly a link to someone’s blog and I suspect most of the others are. So the sample list has already dispensed with the definition fiction.

What about Hot Topics

• Boston Mooninites
• Windows Vista
• Myspace
• Marions Kochbuch
• Paris Hilton

Windows Vista, OK. Paris Hilton even. I can’t even hazard a guess what the Marions and Boston ones are and life’s too short to look at everything on Technorati, but I clicked on MySpace. This brings up a list of 4 definitions.

Number 1 – i.e. most popular – is not in any sense of the word a definition, or even remotely interesting, but it has attracted 9 “votes”.

Number 2 is a discussion about the My Space business model, with a list of links, although you would probably be none the wiser if you didn’t know what MySpace was. At least it’s reasonably interesting and throws in some opinion.

(Number 4 is just silly, not qualifying as a definition or comment and has no votes so far.)

Number 3 says “Myspace http://myspace.com/ is a popular social networking, blogging, and content hosting/sharing site.”

Now that actually looks to me like a definition. But it’s clearly not “popular” enough. It will disappear to the nether reaches of the list after a few more bloggers see that a “definition” on the WTFs is just a way to get people to see your profile name and link to your blogs……..

Hey, why am I wasting time on this when it could be a ranking WTF?

Technorati tags: technology, technorati, wtfs, technorati rank,

Sorry, this is yet another post on Technorati. To repeat WTF are WTFs?
If you look at a blogger’s profile on Technorati, you see a page with two tabs one of which says WTF

Technorati Tags: technology, technorati, WTF

We always appreciate feedback here at WhyDontYou blog. We get little enough of it recently, it seems, despite blogging to within an inch of our lives. So, it was gratifying to get a response to the blog post What is it about evolution and vaccination from http://www.geocreationism.com/.

I have to admit the argument went over my head but the gist seems to be that only Christian Jews are obliged to follow Leviticus. I can’t quite work out how that explains why vaccination and evolution are counter-religious but it sort of explains why Christian fundamentalists don’t feel they have to follow every word of the Old Testament – it’s only meant for Jews, apparently.

Do I have to say – if that is the case – why draw the line at Leviticus? Why insist that any of the Old Testament applies to Christians? And if the Jews were given these rules as God’s chosen people, as in the geocreationist comment, then how come Christians are expecting to get into Heaven come the Rapture? Hasn’t God already made His mind up who He wants to take – and they’re all Jews?

I tried to read the blog but my mind glazed over. (It seems to be a defence of evolution, but sees it as due to divine selection rather than natural selection, so it’s not totally anti-scientific.) But I am still doing the decent thing and giving them the credit of a link here for the effort of replying. That is meant as a lesson for all you other people who could be getting links here ……. 😉

Technorati tags: Intelligent design, Fundamentalism, religion,philosophy, atheism,

Interesting piece in the always wonderful Register today: The President of Romania apparently said that pirated software had started the computer industry in Romania, This was reported as having been said when the Romanian President shared a platform with Bill Gates, at the opening of a Microsoft Technology Centre in Bucharest.

I can’t resist this quote from the Register article:

72 per cent of software in Romania, one of the EC’s newest member states, is pirated according to the Business Software Alliance (BSA). That costs companies like Microsoft $111m in lost revenue each year.

Technorati tags: (why do we bother?) technology, Romania, Microsoft, warez,piracy.