Technofarti
The Guardian Glyn Moody seems to like it but to be honest I’ve stopped using it. The javascript users can put on their blogs to link to Technorati is moody, the stats on any given blog are slow to update (and, I suspect, inaccurate) and the functionality itself is up and down like a bride’s nightie (and like on a Victorian wedding night, it’s mostly down - “Sorry…” doesn’t seems to be the hardest word). And you have to be seriously anal to get any hits in return from “pinging”, laboriously hand-coding “tags”, standing on one leg in field at midnight smeared in cat’s blood, or whatever convoluted method you have to use this week to gain one or two extra visitors.
If you really want to know what others are saying about you, you’d be better off subscribing to the RSS feed via Bloglines of Google’s Blog Search’s result for your blog (put “link:your blog’s url” into the search engine to see who’s linking to you). Either that or check your visitor stats once a day. Or actually writing something people might want to read rather than spending your precious time trying to second guess, what is in effect, a glorified speed-dating system. It’s much, much less irritating than repeatedly hitting F5 every thirty seconds on Technorati in the hope that enough coal’s now gone in the furnace to supply the energy to tell you that nobody’s linked to you today.
Posted on February 16th, 2006 at 11:35 am
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you’d be better off subscribing to the RSS feed via Bloglines of Google’s Blog Search’s result for your blog
Or using Bloglines’ own citations service.
That’s dead good, that is. Shame it’s got no RSS feed. (Never happy me).
Yep - Technorati’s shite. It must be, it says that more people link to you than to me now… Lies, I tell you.
(Actually, I’m pretty sure it must be - according to Technorati, 250 blogs have taken me off their blogrolls in the last three months…)
Google Blogsearch is equally unreliable, though. It’ll pick up on links Technorati doesn’t find, but still get nowhere near all of them. And considering Blogger’s linkback thing still fails to work and Haloscan’s trackbacks are massively temperamental (even when people bother trying to use them), it’s next to impossible to keep up with blogland conversations. Which is mildly irritating, sometimes.
Technorati is by no means perfect, but it’s not total guff - I find it quite useful, and it picks up more links than Google Blogsearch does. And to me, the outages in service (which are far less frequent than in the past) are bearable. Btw, hitting F5 every thirty seconds isn’t helping their overloaded services - best instead creating a watchlist and subscribe to its RSS feed (this does involve setting up a free account, though).
While I don’t tag my posts (don’t see the point with blog posts, which are self-describing), pinging isn’t too hard to set up as I just set all posts to automatically ping pingomatic.com upon completion, which does all the hard work of pinging individual sites.
Remember, trying to do this kind of thing is hard - there is no one format for blogs and trying to automatically parse and work out what blog post links where in a backwards fashion is tricky, even more so when you get a much traffic as Technorati do…
Seems to be best to use a combination of services. Website analytics (in my case, using Statcounter) helps with finding links back. Technorati picks up some stuff, and Truth Laid Bear’s pretty useful as well. Google’s blog search couldn’t seem to find half of the people who linked to me recently…
As a person more interested in content and less so in the technology underlying blogs, I found the post and some of the comments really useful, thank you.
What I would be really interested to know is how to subject-tag your blog entries. Is there any chance you could write a post at the same kind of technical level as the above post to explain how to do that? I do not have a degree in IT and I have a life (so do not have days to work out how to create subject tags from scratch), but would love a non-tecchy article to explain it “tagging for dummies”. Many thanks if you can spare the time to do this!
Maxine - near as I can tell, in Blogger it pretty much has to be done manually, with repeated entry of long-winded HTML every so often. Which is why I haven’t updated my suject archives since mid-November… You need more fancy (usually paid-for) blogging software to get subject archives automatically.
There may well be alternatives, but they’re likely to involve even more technical know-how. Which I don’t have in the slightest.
Bloody hell, the human race is so slack. Where’s my jetpack? Where’s my food in pill form and my holiday on Saturn?
We should be spread across the galaxy but we’re still coding our Technorati tags by hand.
And as for you Applegate, you’re an apologist for the poverty of ambition that currently constitutes the human race. Did Alexander the Great say “it’s a bit hard”? Did Louis Pasteur? Did Moon Zijp? Report for termination, drag factor!
Maxine, have you seen Technorati’s tagging help? It’s about as simple a explanation as there is, I woould say.
I don’t understand any of this. Couldn’t we discuss Peter Mandelson or something?
As Bill Hicks said: “There’s dick jokes on the way, please relax.”
I positively hate Technorati, actually, and so do I. (My other blog is where I usually write about this kind of thing.)
This whole conversation would be moot if everyone stopped using Blogger and moved over to the far superior WordPress!
WordPress handles trackbacks within their own sites without requiring the trackback URL to be put in the trackback box, it has a trackback box, it’s categories feed into Technorati and all the other search programs, etc.
WordPress is the answer to the world’s ills (obviously)!
I don’t hand code my tags, I use a bit of nifty javascript to create a better blog this applet; linked to here. I’ve also put a list of all my main tags in the post template, then all you need to do is delete the ones you don’t want.
I get a small number of hits via them, and you’re right, Technorati hasn’t found most of the links I’ve had last few days. The Backlinks thing is pretty good, as are referral logs.
I’m mostly using tags as an attempt to internally categorise, it sort of works.
Gav; I would switch to wordpress, but it requires paid for sql databases or setting up on a subdomain of wordpress.org, if I do switch, it’ll be to my own domain, and paid for sql hosting is beyond my budget currently (eating is a bit beyond it at times).
Like the bloglines citation thing though, that’s nifty.
I often put the following comment with embedded html technorati search at the end of a post to allow the reader to automatically make an up to the minute search of the topic I have discussed
———
Recent blogs on same topic here
——-
e.g
Recent blogs on same topic here
—————
Little to choose between Technorati and Blogsearch in my experience.
Thanks everyone for taking the time to answer my question about tagging so patiently, and for not telling me I am stupid. I am touched!
I’m going to try all the suggestions and hope one of them will work.
Many thanks again, much appreciated.
I really like bloggers!
PS I expect you have to pay for that Wordpress idea?