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Technorati hates me
15 June 2006 - 09:30
I've blogged about my problems with Technorati before. I feel that either Technorati hates me specifically, or there are some serious problems with the site. Unfortunately it remains the only way to promote your blog that doesn't invovle begging people for links, so I'll have to live with the promblems for now.
Seriously though, if Technorati aims to be "the Google of blogs" they need to get their act together. All you hear from them is that the bloggosphere is expanding at such-and-such a rate and spam is a big problem etc. You don't hear Google complaining about the web expanding or how much link-spamming (Search Engine Optimization is the polite name for it) there is, they just get on with it and provide a reliable service that works as advertised most of the time. Technorati isn't as slow in basic page-response time as it used to be, but when it comes to updating it's index with freshly published content - the whole point of it - it fails miserably, at least for me.
For me Technorati is a way to advertise my blog in the hopes that more people will read it. I expect most people to find it via a search for some related term. Since search results are by default ordered by time since the article in question was posted, it's important that Technorati starts returning your posts in searchs while they are still fresh. If other blogger's posts are picked up sooner and there are a lot of posts on the same subject, your post could be off the bottom of the page before it even gets in the index. My blog software - Pivot - pings a bunch of servers, including Technorati, as soon as I post. For a long time I didn't think this was working. I'd go to the manual ping page on Technorati (see image) and it would still say my blog hadn't been pinged. In the image to the right, I'd posted to The Racing Blog in the last few minutes. At the bottom of that page it says that it "will now go and check.... for new content". I'm guessing it doesn't update the "Updated 6 hours ago" part until it's actually done that check. The problem is that it takes so long for my blogs that it can be at least half an hour before that check is performed. And when it does find the new posting, it uses the date on the post (presumably by cross-referencing it with the RSS feed) and determines that it's already 30+ minutes old.
That would be bad enough but often, even when Technorati does deign to examine your website, it updates that last-posting time, but the new posts it finds don't actually make it into the search index for some reason. In the screen-shot you can see that Technorati thinks The Racing Blog's last post was "Silly Season Roundup" posted 18 hours ago when the screen-shot was taken. Yet Technorati has definitely visited the blog and read the true most recent post because the most recent outbound link (highlighted with a red loop in the screen-shot) is from the true most recent post about Giancarlo Fisichella signing a new deal to stay at Renault, even though Technorati doesn't list that post (and I searched for it as well). After a couple of hours I deleted my original post and added it anew and this time Technoroati managed to both read the page and add the post to it's index and only in about 30 minutes. It's hardly the "real-time search engine that keeps track of what is going on in the blogosphere" they claim it is.
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Robert Scoble leaves Microsoft
12 June 2006 - 09:20
Microsoft's top blogger (or least their top blogging proponent) Robert Scoble has decided to leave the mega-corp and join a start-up specialising in podcasting and video blogging. Although his job at Microsoft was all-round image-enhancer, his main job as far as I was concerned was co-founding and producing a large proportion of the videos on the Channel 9 site. There's a lot of stuff flying around about Robert's move - he sets a lot of things straight with two long posts on his own blog and another post on Channel 9 explaining how this doesn't mean Channel 9 is over.
Personally, I think if this was anyone else leaving Microsoft, or Scoble leaving another other large company it wouldn't be nearly as big a deal. The anti-Microsoft mob are always going to look for some angle on how Microsoft's evil made it impossible for him to stay. The anti-blogging mob are going to look for some angle about how this means Microsoft doesn't really like staff bloggers after all. When it comes down to it, the company he's moving to is the perfect setup for Robert and if you had the chance to take the job that's perfect for you, you'd do it even if it meant taking a bit of flak in the meantime.
Scoble has been described as Microsoft's "Cheif humanising officer" and for sure, I feel better about Microsoft being a large group of people instead of the huge faceless corporation it seemed before. And I wasn't even in the anti-Microsoft mob to start with. Things have changed at Microsoft over the past few years and it's not all down to Scoble, but he does symbolise the changes that have occured in many departments. It used to be that if you found a bug in a product you'd have to go through support (if you had a support contract with them) or try emailing a general bug report address. You might get a response, you might not. You probably wouldn't get any communication from the people that actually developed the product that's for sure. Now you have developers blogging about what they're doing. They take feedback, some teams even give the great unwashed access to their bug tracking systems, and of course there are those crazy enough to appear on Channel 9 videos.
So good luck Robert. I hope it works out with the startup and it makes you rich! Microsoft will manage without you I feel and at least Channel 9 videos will no longer be punctuated by your manic laugh :)
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