Technorati

According to Technorati, there are 112.8 million weblogs (as we’ll see, this is probably a highly dubious number). I’m going to take a wild guess and say that the grand majority of them aren’t very active. Even among active ones, I’m betting that most don’t have much of a readership. Like this blog! Part of this is that blogs fall into a power law distribution, with a small set of bloggers getting the majority of the traffic. The rest of us are in the long tail, and it can be hard to find each other.

Enter Technorati, a service that seeks to track weblogs in numerous ways. You can go there and search on a subject to see what other blogs are saying about that subject. And if you’re a blogger, you can see what other blogs are linking to you. They give each blog an “Authority” score which is based on how many people have linked to you (I think there’s more to it than that, but I don’t care enough to look into it that much), and then they rank all blogs by authority. To give you an idea of how this works, Kaedrin has an authority of 20. The top 10 blogs on Technorati have an authority of somewhere around 10,000 to 25,000.

Here’s the problem: Technorati sucks. It definitely doesn’t track all the blogs out there (not that big a deal, such a task is probably pretty tough), but it’s definitely sure to pick up every new bottom-feeding spammer blog. In other words, every time I write a new post, it gets linked by two freshly minted spam blogs. Those show up fine. Meanwhile, a real blogger (who is listed on Technorati) links me, and Technorati doesn’t pick that up (I find out by looking at my referrers). And the same thing happens when I link to other people. For some reason, Technorati decides some of my posts are not worthy of tracking. For instance, my last post isn’t showing up in Technorati.

This happens every once in a while, and I think I’ve figured out why. It seems to happen when I post out of order. I generally post twice a week, but sometimes I start an entry early. Last week, I started writing my review of GitS:SAC on Tuesday. I hadn’t finished by Wednesday, so I wrote and posted another entry while I finished off my review. On Sunday, I finished my review and posted it, but Technorati didn’t pick it up (despite repeated pings and other attempts to allow the post to show up). Now, none of this shouldn’t matter, but apparently Technorati thinks it does, because this exact situation has happened several times. Maybe it’s because Movable Type numbers my posts, and if I post entries out of order, perhaps it confuses Technorati. For example, last week, I posted entry 1421 after I posted entry 1422. If this is why Technorati can’t figure out that I posted something on Sunday, it’s pretty damn stupid. It can’t be that hard to fix this. Technorati claims that they track posts by scraping the page and also by using RSS feeds, but if that’s the case, they must be doing something really dumb to get tripped up by postings showing up out of order.

So basically, Technorati doesn’t track all the good weblogs, but it keeps up with all the spammers’ weblogs. For some reason, it doesn’t register a post that was written out of order either. So what’s the point? I guess it works ok for bloggers who get lots of links. If you get a lot of links, the signal drowns out the noise of the spammers, and you don’t miss the posts that Technorati doesn’t pick up because you’ve got plenty of other links to go through. But for those of us on the long tail, it’s nearly useless. It doesn’t hurt anything, I suppose, so I’ll continue to check every once in a while, but I’m not getting my hopes up. I don’t think I’ve discovered any new blogs through Technorati that I hadn’t discovered first from my referrers.