Teruterubouzu of And Knitting has noticed a puzzling thing about Technorati’s blog ranker:
Technorati has a blog finder in beta, but it seems seriously flawed. English Cut is listed as the blog that has the “most authority” for the tag knitting Now I’m actually quite a fan of that blog, and have linked to it before, but it seems oddly placed in the knitting category, especially because it doesn’t seem to have a single post that contains the word knitting. It makes me wonder about what other blog finder categories are similarly screwy.
Yes. It’s flawed.
My blog is listed 7th on their Knitting blog list; that’s not too bizarre. But, here’s the really odd thing: I’m 3rd on their list for “intelligent design”!
Why? As far as I can tell, Technorati just counts total links from other blogs with no attempt to see if the other blogs that have linked to you are “about” the same subject. By their reckoning, 70 blogs link to me, and that’s all their blog ranker cares about.
So what that I’ve only blogged about intelligent design something like 3 times. I’m “authoritative”!
I suspect once a fair number of people have claimed blogs and also are using tags, Technorati will figure out they need to only count the blog links from blogs that post on the subject at hand. So, my 68 or so knitting links, and two miscellaneous non-knitting links won’t make me an “authority” on ID just because I discussed the Spaghetti Monster a few times.
Meanwhile, for some reason, Technorati recently stopped noticing my tags when I post. Maybe that will magically fix itself when I upgrade to WordPress 1.5.3? Sigh. . .
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Lucia Liljegren: Copyright 2005-2007 Rights to all site content including knitting patterns, generators and haikus reserved.
Thank you for the trackback. You know what’s wacky? My blog now doesn’t show up in the blog finder at all. Now, I don’t fancy my blog to be of any importance in the grand scheme of things, but it is an oddly timed coincidence.
Comment by Amy — 10/14/2005 @ 1:28 pm
I think they are fiddling. When I first claimed my blog, it stopped showing up under tags– but showed up in blogs. I could tell the ‘bot was crawling the site, and my RSS feed was still there. I emailed… no answer. But, the problem cured itself and now I show up under both.
I think it’s all going to resolve itself. Obviously though, they need to somehow figure out whether the links at a knitting site *come from* knitting sites. Otherwise, a political site that blogged once about knitting could end up “authoritative” on knitting. That would make their resource useless!
Comment by lucia — 10/14/2005 @ 1:34 pm
Yeah, I’m sure you are right. The site is very buggy in general. I hope they get the finder sorted out soon, because it has the potential to be quite useful.
Comment by Amy — 10/14/2005 @ 2:04 pm
curiouser and curiouser
You might remember that I made a brief comment in a previous post about Technorati’s blog finder. The Knitting Fiend picked up on this and wrote about the problems she had noticed. I’m sure it’s just a coincidence, but this
Trackback by and knitting — 10/15/2005 @ 1:23 pm