If you want to use a tool like Technorati as measurement, it actually has to work!
A bit perplex I do read about “Edelman and Technorati Detail the Most Influential Blogs in German, French and Italian” and so far a lot of the comments do reflect what I feel about it: You got to be kidding me?
I would have understood if Technorati just would have outputted some of the numbers they consider to be ‘authorative’ by their measurements. They have their weaknesses, especially when it comes to non US blogs and as far as German Blogs go, I think a lot of them just have given up to care about it.
If you read German, you can take a look at this article in which popculturjunkie explains which changes he has done over the last months to ensure that the basic Technorati-Numbers are matched up to reality – and not for example rank you high just for having done a wordpress theme …
So after being already bad on the basic numbers they indeed manage to top this. I might be okay with Technorati not being as good as they could be – for an automated process. But on top there has been some real human interaction and work has been done to figure out which is really influential.
I am not including a link to Steve Rubels blogpost on this great announcement, because I do not intend to add one bit of linkage through this (ping to David Sifry: Does Technorati count links with set nofollow?).
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2006/10/edelman_and_tec.html
What does Steve’s Article basically say to me is: A blog is influential if it blogs like Americans do. HELLO?
And interestingly they manage to blog about technical topics. No, that is just the blogs who care about getting themselves into technorati.
I have to stop here because this upsets me so much on so many levels.
As I just discovered, David Sifry has been invited to show some of his photographs on a nice event around the place I am staying in. Besides that I am really looking forward seeing those, I will ask him about how “good” he feels about being part of such a mispresentation. By which I mean only in part Technorati but for a big part Edelman’s “study”.
Tags: european view
I am having trouble figuring out technorati. I have blogs linking to my blog which I can see in “linkto:” searches on Yahoo but technorati keeps showing me as having no blogs linking to me. What do I have to do? I already blog like an American. At least I blog like an American that has been living in Puerto Rico the last thirty years. Maybe that’s my problem. I’m not gringo enough. Weird though, you can pick me out in a grocery store (at least down here). I’m so gringo that people comment about me saying “the gringo….etc”. Is it my German heritage? How can technorati tell? I never told anyone there my mother’s maiden name. Oh well — please Nicole read my blog and try to find a reason to link to me. I talk about technical stuff. My next post will be on the feeding habits of termites. That’s a popular subject too.
rainforest inn blog
Bill if you have claimed your blog on technorati and you find your blog in there as well it should index yours. Technorati also has to know about the other blogs as well, or it will not fetch them either. Ping them with your blog URL and ping them with the other blog when they link to you and they should pop up. If not mail support with the exact links, that helps sometimes.
Thanks Nicole. Pinging Technorati after putting the link to the website that was linking to me in the body of one of my posts did the trick almost instantly. I now have one site linking to me on Technorati so I don’t feel like such a pariah. And don’t you think: “the feeding habits of termites” is a universally popular subject right up there with how many blackberry cell phones Lindsey Lohan has thrown away?