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Read it, comment, and share it with your friendsI’m tired of Technorati
It’s been a while since I’ve posted any negative commentary related to web 2.0, but Technorati has disappointed me enough in the past couple months to merit an entry. I used to like Technorati; it was the place for bloggers, both as a directory and a search engine for blogs. Anyone who’s anyone is listed at Technorati and apparently they get a lot of traffic. The problem is that Technorati no longer serves its purpose.
The first thing that bothers me about Technorati is that it’s become very commercialized. When you go to the frontpage, you get ads, tags, new users, and right in the center, a collection of the most talked about things in the blog-o-sphere. These things include music, movies, and videogames… basically, the blog directory is tracking what bloggers are talking about only to drive traffic to commercial products, not blogs. It’s really lame in my opinion… I already know that Justin Timberlake, Borat, and Zelda are at getting all the buzz right now… every form of media that existed before blogs already told me. I want Technorati to help me find new blogs, not old news.
The next thing that bothers me is related to the Technorati Buzz Monitor, a periodic newsletter that includes the top topics being talked about around the blog-o-sphere. Actually, that’s about all it has, aside from random links to a few bloggers and a big fat advertisement. So you would think, well, these top topics would be useful, no? Well, it depends. A click on any topic brings up a text search on blogs for that topic, but that doesn’t ensure that all the results are actually relevant to the topic. A tag search is more accurate, except for the problem that not all bloggers tag their entries. To be honest, Technorati’s search engine does a decent job, but there’s still room for improvement.
Another thing that bothers me is the ways that Technorati ranks blogs. The first way is by number of inbound links, which isn’t really a good measure of a blog’s success. The number of people linking to you doesn’t translate to the number of readers you have or the amount of traffic you get, just to how much linkbait you use. The other way is by number of users who have added you as a favorite, which I used to think was a good, honest measure of ranking blogs until I found out that bloggers are gaming the system. Plus, whereas Technorati does a lot of work to ensure that bloggers don’t game the link ranking by getting inbound traffic from giveaways or forced links (a search for Binary Bonsai tells you it’s #17, but it’s excluded from the top 100), they don’t (or can’t) do anything to stop bloggers from gaming the favorites ranking. Plus, Technorati doesn’t do much to encourage users to pick favorites; the most any blog has is Boing Boing with a little over a thousand, but that’s a small number compared to how many people deify it.
But what bothers me the most about Technorati (to make a short rant long) is the fact that in all the time that I’ve know the site, it has done nothing to help me find great new blogs. Technorati does a great job of telling you all the blogs that are already immensely popular (which, coincidentally, I heard enough about without Technorati’s help), but it does nothing to highlight new bloggers who are living the Z-list dream.
In the end, I think the core of what bothers me about Technorati is that it’s mostly about the A-list… the A-list in blogging as well as all the commercial stuff that bloggers are talking about. It’s nice to know who’s the most popular and who’s in the limelight right now, but I want a site that connects me with the Z-list… tomorrow’s celebrities, not today’s. If anyone knows of a website that does a good job of that, let me know. Otherwise, it’s time to start thinking about starting my own website. Hmm… ZeroratiTM?
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Responses to my articleNice post. I’ve found MyBlogLog to be pretty helpful in finding blogs I never knew existed. But by the way… I found this post through Technorati…
The problem with Technorati is that they index EVERYBODY, including all the MySpace “blogs”, and that requires a whole Greek alphabet slapped after the Z-list. There is so much noise, it’s difficult to find anything of value.
A while ago I posted http://compsci.ca/blog/blog-predictions-for-2007-blogs-as-resume/ with a relavent point:
“It is time to move away from Technorati’s tagline of “55 million blogs… some of them have to be good.†to 9rules‘ “Explore the best content on the web.†I want to see that difference.”
Webomatica: What irony
I should check out MyBlogLog.
Tony: That’s a very good point. I’m reminded of Vox, which is meant to be a very community-oriented blogging platform. It’s built for friends and family, whereas Wordpress.com is intended for very public blogs. A site like Technorati should index Wordpress.com but not Vox, idealistically speaking. I doubt there can ever be a public site that discriminates like that, but at least we do have networks like 9rules where one can find top blogs.
I was talking a while back about how Digg/Reddit/etc. have failed to be helpful to the blogging community, and how we need a site like Digg intended for blogs. If there was such a thing I’d like to see it.
Inbound links are not the best metric, but they are directly correlated with the quality of the content. It’s true, once you’re on the A-list, it gets progressively easier to get get incoming links. You become an information hub of sorts; you have credibility. It’s nothing new, and I doubt Technorati will try to adopt any other metric.
But I do agree with you on overall status of the site. It’s not very helpful, and what’s even worse, it’s broken more than half of the time. Come to think of it, they’re a prime target for a better service.
Ilya - with your PageRank for RSS and that nifty SVD Recommendation System… I’m starting to expect a Web 2.0 startup out of you. I don’t care what it is, I’ll subscribe
I used it more in the past than I do now.
What I found happening was when searching for particular topics of interest I was given list upon list of bot blogs, aggregating everyone elses articles. That’s when I had enough.
“Anyone who’s anyone is listed at Technorati and apparently they get a lot of traffic.” - is that supposed to be true? I get maybe one or two hits a month from Technorati and my ranking isn’t poor for a personal blog.
The thing that pisses me off about Technorati is the completely crap and inconsistent rating system. Some days it thinks I’ve got over 220 incoming links and some days it can drop as low as 80. I understand that they drop links as part of the ranking after a certain amount of time, but if that was the issue why does it shoot back up to over 200 the day after?
It’s flawed, badly flawed.
Jem: I made a grammar mistake there, the “they” was referring to Technorati. I know most bloggers don’t get much traffic from Technorati. I’m sure you could game the system by blogging about all the daily hot searches, but that would be lame.
And according to the latest newsletter, they just fixed a bug in the system that tracks links. I don’t know if that will fix the fickle nature of it, but it sure would be nice.
“the “they†was referring to Technorati. ” ..that makes more sense, heh
I hope the links thing is fixed. I’ve got an OK rank right now and I want to keep it that way!
mannnn, technorati kills me.
I noticed my inbound links went from 220 to 215 over the course of a week about a year ago. I emailed and inquired about it, and within about two months I was down to about 100 inbound links.
Which, even checking the blogs technorati tracks for my site (well over 200 are listed), kills me.
I don’t know if they only list inbound links within a six month frame or something? beats me.
Phil: Right on, they do have a six month time frame. Then again, I don’t even think they should track sidebar links, at least not in the same category as links made within posts.
But after all, what’s the point of tracking trackbacks and pingbacks? If 1,000 blogs are writing new and interesting posts because you inspired them to write it, then tracking those links makes sense, but if 1,000 blogs out there are just regurgitating what you wrote, that means there are a 1,000 useless blogs out there. The latter happens much more often than the former.
Two years ago, I found it to be a very handy website, but it was so much smaller then. I don’t really blame Technorati, to be honest. While Technorati has changed, it’s done so in trying to keep up with the changes of the web.
The people I blame are more the “bloggers.” I am severely annoyed–probably more than I should be–that there are people out there who think what they did for two hours on Wednesday night is of any interest to anyone outside of their friends and family, especially when it’s poorly written material. And yet, these people merrily submit to Technorati and may even chuck up a few AdSense ads, which of course, they tell people to click on, even though that’s against policy. You know how it goes. Technorati shouldn’t list that stuff, but then how on earth would they filter it? The web is actually a majority of that, I would say.
I definitely agree about the inbound links issues, though. Technorati doesn’t even register most of mine (no idea why, really), and then there are actually a couple of spam links to me that I’ve tried to get them to remove–unsuccessfully. I’m still trying to get my head around how a Paris Hilton porn site is linking to me. I contacted Technorati and never heard back from them, and the site still links to me.
I also agree about Technorati being about the A-list. I feel that way a lot about Del.icio.us posting top links, and, oh God, Digg. It’s sort of frustrating. The reason I like blogs so much is because it gives back to the little guy, the niche groups, but we seem determined as a species to always look for what’s popular. And then somehow we turn around and wonder why we get no personal recognition. Funny thing, the human mind.
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