Despite wordpress automatically pinging and us manually pinging Blogrolling.com as well as using Ping-O-Matic at 15 – 30 minute intervals, not one of the previous five posts have been shown on the Atheist Blogroll. Now, the blogroll is a wonderful thing and we here at WhyDontYou want to fully support it, but the fact remains it is not working properly. As it stands, blogs no longer get Technorati ranking from it which means its main purpose is to send traffic to a site. Most people use the abbreviated version showing the most recently updated blogs. As it now seems to ignore the good blogs when they update, oddly showing a **new next to all the content-free/YouTube blogs, it is becoming less and less useful. If I had the technical know-how to propose a solution, I would, but surely there must be, somewhere in AtheistLand, a person with the required knowledge to solve the problem? Anyone?
Why Dont You Blog?
Challenging the Zeitgeist
As an example, the widget here shows the 25 blogs with the most recent posts.
The oldest on the list, has an update time of 1815hrs (GMT) and the most recent has an update time of 2253 GMT (interesting as it is only 2217GMT at the moment). Between those two times, this blog has three posts. For example, Painfully Weird was at 1845GMT.
All of which were pinged to blogrolling.com (and ping-o-matic) with apparently positive responses.
Yet not one of them, nor this post, have resulted in this blog getting a **New.
Yes, it is frustrating.
I think that tne “**New” is placed there by Joey. Obviously, only Joey could tell us that.
I would not be the least bit surprised to learn that Technorati uses an algorithm that favors blogs with particular attributes, though. You are using WordPress — pings from WordPress show up on Technorati, while ‘blogspot’ pings don’t. Go figure!
If you want to appear in Technorati listings, you might want to add direct tags to technorati in addition to your Wordprss tags.
I’m not quite sure how you are deciding which blogs are “good blogs”, though. Sometimes the popular blogs are just those that have been around longer. Blog traffic tends to generate backlinks and the search engines log this. You appear to be assuming that backlinks indicate that the blog is ‘good’, as opposed to merely being in the self-fulfilling ‘already noticed’ category.
I have often found that the best website is on page 3 of a Google search, for example. Most people read and link to only the first couple of websites that a search tosses up. The result of this skew is that the popular stay popular while more recent websites go unnoticed.
Salient
Thanks for your comment and for taking the time to offer help.
I think T_W was really just voicing frustration when he talked about “good” blogs. What we’ve both felt recently is that the blogroll tends to be more effective at showing posts from (conceptual – no criticism of anyone) blogs that just show links to Youtube videos or discuss only very personal things than it is at showing the blogs that we usually read.
Like your blog, for instance. I pretty well always enjoy it. I might spot your posts on PlanetAtheism and click on them. If your new posts don’t appear there or on the Atheist blogroll, I’m probably not going to look at your page, until the posts have piled up, and a post that really interests me might be a week out of date.
It’s lazy of me, but it’s easy to leave off searching favourite blogs for new posts and just rely on their names popping up on the blogroll when they’ve posted something else. If we don’t know they have posts, we don’t see them until there are a few and the ones we read are out of date. If new blogs and/or blogs we seldom see (but would like to read) don’t appear on the blogroll, we aren’t likely to get to see them
T_W’s rant wasn’t about popularity or Technoauthority. I think it was mainly about becoming invisible to the blogroll – minimising the chances of getting either stray visitors from the blogroll and visits from people who actually want to read us regularly
Mojoey himself reckoned there were problems with the way the blogroll worked. He said this in a comment here the last time we whinged about it. (If the poor man had to sit at his pc typing **New every time anyone posted, Pharyngula alone would give him RSI)
Yes, the most “popular” blogs and websites are usually not the best. I completely agree with you, that it’s usually best to start on page three of a google search. This isn’t to do with “popularity” Google seems insanely generous to us, if anything. We get visits from search engine hits where you know the visitor must have wondered why a blog that made an accidental mention of a word (us) comes up before sites that actually deal with it.
This blog is supposed to already have Technorati tags. They work in Technorati. I tested it because I thought the latest WordPress upgrade might be to blame for Technorati’s odd authority listings. (Don’t get me started on Technorati, whoch refuses to count almost any atheist links at all any more but will now instantly credit us with links from scraper spam that we haven’t even allowed through the Akismet filter.)
More for salient’s eyes only (more or less)
Btw
I have tried a few times to post comments on your posts. I can’t because I don’t have blogger or googgle account.
In fact, it’s even worse than that, because I do have both but I’ve messed about with my operating system so often I have no idea what the names and passwords are for these accounts and both blogger and google get a bit sniffy when I try to set up new user accounts, telling me I already have one so I can’t open another one.
Sorry about that. I set the comments section to moderated because I really don’t have the time or patience to deal with spam by theists and blogger doesn’t have Akismet.
It’s very easy to get a blogger account — it’s a simple matter of signing up with your email address. It’s hard to keep track of sign-ups from long ago, isn’t it? Perhaps you just need to use a different email address — even a yahoo or hotmail address should suffice. I don’t say this only so that you can post on my blog, but because there are many blogger blogs out there in the blogosphere. Good luck!
Sorry about that. I set the comments section to moderated because I really don’t have the time or patience to deal with spam by theists, and blogger doesn’t have Akismet.
It’s very easy to get a blogger account — it’s a simple matter of signing up with your email address. It’s hard to keep track of sign-ups from long ago, isn’t it? Perhaps you just need to use a different email address — even a yahoo or hotmail address should suffice. I don’t say this only so that you can post on my blog, but because there are many blogger blogs out there in the blogosphere. Good luck!
I apologize for the two copies of the same comment — WordPress asked me to try again and then complained that I was repeating myself. You just can’t please some blog providers! Thanks for the nice comment about my blog.
You are quite correct about the number of video or repost of articles or one-liner blog entries that show up, Heather. I have often wondered how they came to rank so highly. I suspect that those blogs that carry advertising get a boost up the ranks. The search engines appear to rank according to numbers of links and probably to numbers of actual hits.
Many of the subscribers to Blogroll.com appear to be spam sites, so that may be clogging up the works.
That’s interesting, and somewhat alarming about Technorati’s blocking atheist tags. It’s an American organization, so I’m not surprised to hear it. Living in Canada, I have noticed the worsening epidemic of political religious pressure that operates almost everywhere in the US. The plague is spreading, alas. That’s why I started to add my 2 cents to the anti-religiosity campaign. Creationists have commandeered the Internet.
I think that any of your difficulties with attracting readership probably relates to the sheer number of blogs out there.
Well, blogroll has pinging issues. They’ve outgrown their bandwidth. Too many subscribers, too many pings, not enough server space, etc… I wrote to them, and … they’re working on it. I think identifying a new blog roll service (new as in them being newer, with better technology and fewer customers) and moving the list over might help.
I’ve been “analyzing the phenomenon” and some days I see my blog listed as **new with a 6 to 48h delay. So, for example, if your blog stats say most traffic comes through between noon and 8 PM, and you post around noon, and there’s a delay of 8 hours, you’ve missed the window…. So I did see a drop in clicks I get from blogs on the atheist list, which is probably because the *new mark is hit or miss. I also noticed Technorati failing to update blog listings…
I think I wrote a post as some point about the competitiveness of blogging services. If Technorati is failing, will the importance of authority diminish and will the next kid on the block become hip? I stopped using Technorati about a month ago, and added all my favorite blogs to RSS readers. Web economies are a fertile ground to test free-market theories. Unregulated competition is still king in the blogging world (well, minus some Google practices…) so odds are “customers” will shop around and move to better providers. And maybe so should we.
Salient, heather, Mana – thanks for the comments. I will reply as a new post, I was going to comment here but it got quite long. 🙂
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