Why Dont You Blog?

The Register reports on Technorati’s problems resulting from its redesign. It knocked itself out of operation (surely not unprecedented for Technorati. I thought it let its imaginary Monster out to ravage it every weekend)

The Register argues that Technorati has more or less given up on indexing blogs and concentrated on images.

So what was always a lousy blog search tool is now little more than a lousy image search tool - this is not going to worry Yahoo! or Google

I hope not. For all my whining about it, Technorati is pretty useful.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Popularity: 18% [?]

This blog has been going through some traumatic changes to its functionality.

It doesn’t look much different because most of the changes to its appearance were repellent in IE6 and earlier browsers, although they looked great in IE7, so it’s temporarily reverted to a look which it’s had for .. oh, I don’t know… all of about 6 weeks.

The main differences for visitors is that you can find much more by tags, as if the blog was trying to be a mini-Technorati. You can open the Tag Archive page and search on several tags. (These are even presented in a tag cloud.)

The big difference for us is that we can tag things by just clicking on them. Adding tags used to be like pulling teeth. It probably contributed to my blogs being unfeasibly long because I couldn’t bear to have to go through the tagging process again (like a graffiti artist with a sore arm?) So the outcome should be less blog words, more tag words. Or at least, more tag words.

However, we don’t have full tagging liftoff yet.The older posts either don’t have any tags or only have Wordpress category tags. By older, I mean “up to January 2007″. So that’s nearly all of them. As the posts here go back over a year, it’s an arduous task to add tags and it’s getting done piecemeal. All the same. it should be possible to find most of what we have for most of the topics.

And by the way, why do people keep typing “none” into the search bit in the header? This is just bizarre. It’s not when people click on the search box without putting anything in, because that brings up a blank page.

Popularity: 30% [?]

Popularity: 30% [?]

Aren’t tags great. Add the combination of technorati’s tag obsession (despite its other wise crazy inconsistencies) with MySpace’s crazy users and their “Religion and Philosophy” category and you can find some wonderful results of a search. One of my favourites is the Philosophy search. It really does produce a wide, wild and wonderful selection of peoples posts. Take this for example, when I did the search a few minutes ago:

While some of the links may seem tame enough, further investigation puts paid to that! It really is funny reading some of the things people seem to believe. The cynic in my partially suspects people are writing this nonsense, not because they believe it, but because they think it is cool or funny or something.

Add this to the volume of creation science videos on YouTube though and I may well be wrong. On a lighter note though, there is one thing which restored my faith in humanity (even in theists as this appears to come from a very Christian blog post - its on MySpace for a start..) (read original)

Joke of the day:

where can you find 50 cent and eminem?

between your sofa cushions

It might just be me having a funny turn today, but I really liked that joke.

Popularity: 14% [?]

Popularity: 14% [?]

Just when you may have thought Technorati was approaching normal behaviour, this happens:

I would say it is getting repetitive but that is, surely, stating the obvious. Despite there being a positive number of blog posts each day (chart) of the last 30 days, Technorati claims to have no posts. It is doing this an awful lot at the moment.

Before this blog creates the impression it just doesn’t like Technorati (which is close to the truth now), I just want to highlight the importance of an “open standard” for things like this. People writing blog posts have no real way of knowing if their comments are getting picked up by Technorati - and if you don’t appear in the three posts listed on that page, people are very unlikely to ever read your posts. Even Google is more open and honest about how it indexes pages.

On it’s own this would be bad enough but it could be argued that blog creators will blog no matter who reads it. The bigger problem is for people searching with Technorati. The results you get from a search are almost randomly arbitrary. When you search, you have no idea if you are getting the latest posts, most relevant posts or anything. It is madness.

Now I actually don’t want the likes of Google to take over as the Blog search engine of choice (it has just as many flaws but different ones), however as Technorati seems to be spectacularly dropping the ball this may be inevitable.

So much for the weblogs being the “great publishing revolution” that allows the masses to become journalists. Unless you get millions of links you wont show up on Google, and your chances of showing up on Technorati seem to depend on you having a MySpace blog or some other covert whim.  Does this need new software to solve it? Are search engines like IceRocket better? At the moment I dont think so, but times change…

Popularity: 27% [?]

Popularity: 27% [?]

It strikes me more and more that Technorati is not really “cutting the mustard” with regards to how it aggregates blog posts and how it tries to represent the blogosphere. This is not a bad thing as such - it is more a case that Technorati seem to have bitten off a lot more than they can chew and it certainly is (as previously mentioned) time for a new site to take over.

Once upon a time Yahoo was the dominant search engine on the Internet, then after a while it bogged itself down and people migrated to the sleek newcomer of Google. Can Google do the same with blogs? Personally I hope not, but then I feel that Google is starting to fall behind in the search engine stakes (poor quality search results for example), so they may be better off concentrating on that more than anything else.

As an example of Technorati’s oddness, while I was trying to see if it was ever going to realise new posts had been made here, I was refreshing the page about this blog and I noticed the “posts per day” in the corner. The really odd thing was, each refresh made it alternate between two graphs that bore almost no relation to reality (as well as the most recent posts changing to be either days or hours old). Below you can see the first and second vesions. Do they look the same? (I am aware the scales are different).

For example, how many posts were made on 14 Jan? (hint 2) How many were made on 17 Jan (hint - not 19 yet!)

Will some one PLEASE come up with a site which does it better than Technorati.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Popularity: 15% [?]

There are two incomprehensible things with Technorati (whose name be praised - this is CONTRUCTIVE CRITICISM) at the moment.

1. It is supposed to drop blog links that are more than 180 days old. technorati’s blog It seems to interpret this at random. I.e.Even though there seems to be no change in the number of linked blogs less than 180 days old, the number goes down (and occasionally up ) seemingly at random.
2. Much more serious, it delays noticing the existence of some new posts until they are so old (say twenty minutes) appear on page two, when ranked by time/date. This can be really frustrating. It means that a post on a remotely popular tag topic doesn’t even have its conceptual Warhol’s five minutes of fame.

Only posts tagged with really unpopular tags are certain to stay on the front page for long enough for anyone to see them, and, obviously they are unpopular tags because almost no one ever clicks on them.

Popularity: 15% [?]

Popularity: 15% [?]

I know this blog tends to “poke fun” at technorati a lot, but right now it deserves it.

After being told that Technorati was playing up (see http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog/2006/11/28/technorati-tech-support-needed/) I thought I would check it out myself and see what it produced.

Visiting the links about this blog page (obviously where my main interest lies ), I thought I would check out what Technorati thought about other blogs which linked here and what it described the site’s profile as.

Trying the standard search which looks at blogs linking to a site (http://www.technorati.com/ search /http://www.whydontyou.org.uk/blog?cc=xrw7n395cr) was a total non-starter on IE. I tried this link (by clicking the link and by pasting it into the URL bar) several times, almost every time I got an odd windows error message saying “Operation Aborted” and IE returned to the about:blank page it likes so much. One time I got through, I ended up with a page which said “Sorry, no blogs link here.” Strange as at the top of the page it said “14 links from 6 blogs.”

Curiousity got to me and I checked the URL in Firefox. This was even stranger in some respects. I had a few page not founds then all of a sudden a hit! The page appeared but without the “Sorry, no blogs link here” malarky. Firefox claimed that while the site still had “14 links from 6 blogs” there were actually 19 links (Sorted by freshness) and then procedes to show 18.

Amazing.

I tried the “» View my profile” link but after ten attempts (five each IE 7 and FF2.0) which only got operation aborted or blank pages, I gave up. I don’t have that much patience even looking for pure hubris.

Well, if this is the face of Web 2.0, I cant wait for the bubble to burst.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Popularity: 20% [?]

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.

Popularity: 20% [?]

Popularity: 20% [?]

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.

Popularity: 21% [?]

Popularity: 21% [?]

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.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Popularity: 18% [?]