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.

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.

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!

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!

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.

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.)

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.

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.