January 30, 2008
Posted by Jim Macdonald at 07:52 AM * 19 comments
If things work as advertised, this is supposed to show our Technorati authority.
This may not be a good idea.
Previous appearances of Technorati at ML include:
- Making Light on Technorati’s “Buzz TV”
- Baby, pull yourself together
- Exasperated with Technorati (again)
- Yet another angle
- Interesting technique
View blog top tags
[UPDATE]
Ok, now can you fix the rss comments feed to deliver items in date-time order? Pretty please??
Oh yeah? Well, my Technorati authority rank number thing is almost a thousand times bigger than yours! I win!
What? Oh. ...never mind.
I, for one, welcome our new Robo-Rat Overlords!
So why does the list of tags include neither dinosaurs nor sodomy? Is this an accurate description of what Making Light is about?
If only the folks at Kineda.com would revise their Blogebrity badge to update automatically in the same way.
Should the Technorati page show only two authors?
Heh. All of my blogs together have a combined authority of 11, so I think that's awesome.
Should we be doing this? It can only lead to invidious comparisons. I dearly love Making Light, but it's not worth mumblety-mumble times more than any number of sites I could mention.
The first time I went to a gathering of BosWash bloggers, I very carefully refrained from checking out the relative Technorati rank of other bloggers I knew would be there, so I wouldn't know it when I met them.
(I looked them all up when I got home. There's a reason I give up Technorati every Lent.)
(Bxnl, V'yy nqzvg vg: Bhgenaxvat lbhe cerivbhf rzcyblre? Cevpryrff.)
It also puts us at the mercy of Technorati, which is not a good place to be. They're not reliable. They go through long periods of strange database behavior. Worse, they apparently change the ways they calculate standings. This past September, I gleefully noted that ML had finally, by small increments over a period of years, crept all the way up into the top 1,000 blogs. Only a few days later, Technorati rejiggered something and we plummeted down to well below 2,000. How can you trust them after a thing like that?
I am trying very, very hard to refrain from asking whether putting that little button on our entries will impr --
No. Mustn't even think that. Very, very bad.
The Technorati link never finishes loading for me. Is there a video or a Flash-based ad embedded in the page? (I chose not to install a Flash plug-in for Opera to make it easy to avoid such nonsense; if necessary I'll use Internet Exploder.)
How can Technorati possibly be trustworthy? Their list of "Top Tags: What Making Light Is About" doesn't include knitting!
The badge-graphic is not visible on this machine, running Safari 3.0.4, under OS X 10.4.11. Looked fine on Windows machine running Firefox yesterday.
The badge shows up running Firefox 2.0.0.11 on the same machine.
Do we want to include http://technorati.com/tools/linkcount/ in our template?
Results of the test so far:
Y'know the little bubble on the Cloverfield post, "Technorati Cosmos: Other blogs commenting on this post"?
Well, right now it lists one blog that links back. (http://meganpowell.net/blog/2008/01/28/cloverfield-comments/)
However, just by looking through the Technorati list of links to Making Light from blogs, I found two others:
http://monkeyfilter.com/link.php/15336
and
http://speaklib.blogspot.com/2008/01/posts-from-blogs-you-should-be-reading.html
That is to say, they missed two-thirds of the blogs they themselves listed.
This is me being not impressed.
Sorry, just while we're on the meta subject of blogs, TNH has there been any progress on that compilation of posts about editing/publishing/getting published?
I wish that Making Light supported blog tags. It would make navigation much easier.
On the invidiousness of posting a blog containing your technorati ranking, I think that your display of conscience about whether it should be posted alleviates the issue of intentional resentment creation. If someone can't feel good for you for doing a good job, that's their own problem, not one caused by you.
Finally, thank you for teaching me a new word (invidious). Awesome.
Making Light has never been about seeking validation from outsiders, why start now?
Worrying about Technorati rankings is like worrying about how the Society of Great Literature Critics ranks the site. Why not just include a wikipedia widget while you're at it?
Why not just include a wikipedia widget while you're at it?
Because Technorati is at least theoretically useful....
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