Archive for the ‘technorati’ Category

Once upon a time, Technorati rankings meant something. I used to look at mine regularly (probably more regularly than was wise). And that only increased when Todd Andrlik created what became the AdAge Power 150 blog, which ranked PR and marketing blogs on a number of factors, including Technorati authority. And Dave Sifry’s regular reports on the state of the blogosphere were fascinating reading.

But those days are gone. Technorati has gone from a blog search engine to … I’m not sure what. And man, is their system borked.

An example:

I migrated this blog from Blogger to this WordPress platform in November. And I thought it would be a good idea to get it listed in Technorati. The process involves placing a “claim token” on the site and in the RSS feed. On November 25, they noted that token and said my blog was “awaiting review.” For what? I didn’t know. For how long? They didn’t say.

After a few days, I visited the support forums Technorati’s established on GetSatisfaction. Uhoh. There were dozens and dozens of open threads, and one titled “Blog claiming is taking FOREVER!” featured prominently. Worse, it was begun by a Technorati employee.

That thread now has more than 400 posts from frustrated bloggers. During that time, one Technorati web developer was responding to reports of problems with more than a little defensiveness:

“There’s a lot of misinformation here, and I’m afraid that the time it would take to correct it all would impact the wait time for more approved blogs. I share your frustration, and wish I had a spare couple of days to respond to each comment.”

“back when I was frequently posting here, most of what I received in response was more grief.”

My blog sat from November 25-January 19 waiting for “review”, which apparently involved weeding out spam blogs. Three of those weeks were apparently spent reviewing submissions from November 24. Yes, that’s what I wrote. 15 working days to review one day’s submissions.

On January 6, VP of marketing Jen MacLean posted on the Technorati blogthat “Blog claiming is fixed“. She was wrong.

A week later, blogger Louis Gray claimed that Technorati was focusing on quality. According to Gray’s blog, written after meeting with CEO Richard Jalichandra,

Many bloggers, including the visible futurist Stowe Boyd, have already given up on Technorati, after seeing the company’s early promise seem to crash and burn, through a confusing product strategy, spam-filled results, poor uptime, and bad news followed by no news. It seems the darkest times are behind them, and the company will have to make good on its promises before many bloggers learn to trust them again. But in my meeting with them Monday, they clearly said they’re not done fighting.

I disagreed.

On January 19, the review process ended and I was asked to rewrite the description of the blog. I tried to do that, but there was no way to do so because their web site was glitched. On January 25, they fixed that glitch, I resubmitted my description, and here I sit. Again. Waiting.

It’s shocking to me that a company that has received $32M in venture funding and been around since the beginning of the blogging revolution could be operating so, so very badly. Perhaps it’s time that we all just look away and let it die as pain-free a death as possible.

This is going to be REAL quick, ‘cos I’m up to my, um, ankles in alligators after a week offline and on vacation.

But I couldn’t resist chiming in on Joe Thornley’s meme / lament (lameme) for Technorati, the tool that done him wrong.

In my case, it’s Picasa. I’m a huge fan of Google stuff, so my utter failure to get this to work, or to understand the benefits of it for me, after about three attempts at different times and on different machines, remains an unhealed wound.

In the end, I just went back to Flickr, which I understood and which seemed to understand me.

And if I weren’t so dang cheap I’d keep up a FlickrPro account, which would really give me everything I needed for images and more.

Honorable mention in this category goes to Pandora, which I fell in absolute love with, and then closed off access to subscribers out of the United States.

As a house concert presenter, I am totally for performers getting compensated for their work, whether live or recorded. But it seems like the Internet radio stations are getting dinged unfairly to me, and I can’t figure out why. Other than the fact that the record industry just seems to be bound and determined to do EVERYthing wrong.

Ciao,
Bob.

So Derek K. Miller gets to try out a Zune and I don’t?

Awwww? If Matchstick and Microsoft are out there, I’m open, and I’ve got way more T’rati authority than Miller. I’ve even got music cred, among tens of people.

C’mon. Please?

Happy fourth to the US readers, and wish me luck at seeing Steely Dan tomorrow at the Bluesfest. I’m hoping for a monster guitar solo on Chain Lightning. That would make my day.

Ciao,
Bob.

Todd at PR Squared has a great analysis of the Technorati-PR NewsWire deal that wraps up much of the early commentary.

Another useful link to understanding some of the implications is the comment by Dave Armon of PRNewsWire on Shel Holtz’s site. Holtz was asking, in essence, if this wasn’t a bit overblown (why a ‘partnership’ when they coulda just added a button? Don’t competitors do this already?), and if there was something wonky about the function.

Armon’s response (emphasis mine): the new feature “tracks specific conversations about the press release itself. …each of the nearly 1,000 news releases we distribute each day would automatically generate a unique tracking url to make it easier for our customers and press releases readers to track conversations that relate directly to that press release, without having to go through the steps of doing it themselves.”

I’m going to try and find out whether there will be a Canadian rollout of this new function soon. Stay tuned.

Ciao,
Bob.