I wrote earlier about how wrong Technorati was in depicting the status of the blogs I put on my favorites listing. I added 48 and at the time, most of them were reported to have been updated several days ago. This status was wrong. These are my favorites and one of the reasons for them being my favorites is that they are active and update with fresh content almost daily in most cases and several times daily in a good number of cases.
I just went through the listing of the 48 and by a rough calculation only 11 of the statuses are "correct". That is a 25% success rate. Now, my view of the blogosphere is a small view but if this is a random sample and only 25% is accurate, then why should we trust any number from Technorati! 25% in baseball is a so-so hitter. In technology, if you're not in the 5 9's range, you should be toast.
Disclaimer on rough calculation - it says "updated". When I visited the blog, if the posting was date/timed within the time frame, it was marked as correct. If it was in the ball park, I marked it correct. Given variances in time zones and time zones settings for blogs, and Technorati's process for crawling and updating, there can be some squishiness here.
But let's single out one for a prime example: the Worthwhile blog. According to Bloglines, it has 260 subscribers. The activity is regular and since it is a group blog, it is rare that a business day goes by without a single posting. So what is Technorati's status for it? It should say it was updated within some number of hours or at most, one day ago? No, it has no status.
Can you do a similar audit of your own favorites? What does it show? Maybe my sample is all wet but I'd like to know.
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I've not found much of anything to be accurate, tbh. While blogging for a relatively large website - using Blogger - I discovered (huge surprise) that my posts weren't being included in Google search results. After cross-posting to my own WordPress blog, those posts showed up.
ReplyDeleteNow, since I use WP, I did what many people probably do: I relied on the default "Ping-o-matic" to send out updates. That didn't work. So a few months back I added individual ping URLs via linebreaks in WordPress ("Separate multiple service URIs with line breaks."). But last night I checked Technorati to find that my blog hadn't been updated in almost 300 days (I post on average 4 times a day). So much for either Ping-o-matic or using separate notifiers.
Of course I've pinged manually now. And when I do a search, guess what ... Technorati doesn't include older, relevant posts. If they don't include mine, I can only imagine how many blog entries are out there that I'm not getting when I do a search.
I suppose this sort of thing contributes to the "power law" stuff that's been written about quite a bit recently.
Oh well.
Broken. Definitely broken. What are our alternatives? And what does Sifrey have to say about this?
ReplyDelete-- Troy Worman