DISQUS

Publishing 2.0: Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically

  • Ted · 3 years ago
    Technorati does indeed suck. I don't understand why they can't get it together-- they keep coming up with wack-ass features instead of focusing on the core functionality.

    If Google blog search were to add 2-3 more basic features, I would probably never use Technorati again.
  • Mark Devlin · 3 years ago
    FYI:

    #26 http://k-tai.impress.co.jp/
    News site about mobile phones and technology. Publisehd by one of Japan's biggest technology publishers i.e. not a personal blog.

    #29 http://atnewz.jp/
    This looks like a Japanese Digg-style tech site not a personal blog

    Technorati Japan has a list of the top Japan blogs here: http://technorati.jp/talk/top100.html

    It is in Technorati's interest to continually promote the blog space as growing but considering that the results now include high-noise-low-content MySpace posts I wonder how much of the current "growth" is actually taking place outside MySpace or MSN Spaces. And how many of the "blogs" that are tracked are not simply news sites where people comment (including my own site).
  • Matthew Hurst · 3 years ago
    Changes of this sort are the result of 2 variables: changes in the blogosphere, and changes in the aggregators capacity/ability to crawl content. In other words, although we might look at a list and think that the list is changing, it is more likely that the bias in the coverage of weblogs is changing in some skewed manner (e.g. suddenly crawling a new hosting system, or a new language).
  • Seth Finkelstein · 3 years ago
    Britney Spears, or her Japanese equivalent, will always beat out Dave Winer among the general population. So from one point of view, there is a real indication as to when one is measuring the general population. On the other hand, when that point is reached, it should also be recognized that the meaning of the comparison has changed, and more localization needs to be considered.

    You probably don't even know who the most popular movie star is in India. But they might outrank the most popular movie star in the US in terms of fan devotion. But remember, you're still not going to ever be a movie star yourself.
  • Chris Edwards · 3 years ago
    Some of these blogs look real but those MSN Spaces ones look real suspicious if you start to examine the kinds of links that point to them. Try M¥$ŤěяĬǾũ§ ĢÎѓĻ, in with a bullet at number 8 with a mere 20 posts in two days according to Technorati. Lots of supposedly different blogs, almost all on MSN Spaces and with remarkably similar entries. Sounds like someone at MSN is going to have to do some weeding over the next few days.

    I wouldn't say I've gone through the list extensively - Technorati keeps dropping out. But that's probably because these MSN Spaces blogs are hammering away at the site's ping API. I wouldn't be surprised if the whole Technorati 100 has been replaced by the end of the weekend, before the clean-up starts on Monday.
  • Chris Edwards · 3 years ago
    On further inspection, it looks as though the MSN blogs that are linking are personal blogs created by real people rather than spam bots. But the links pushing the target sites up the rankings in Technorati are fakes.

    Every single entry on the first page of link-love for »-(¯`v´¯)-» xEuNiCex »-(¯`v´¯)-» at Technorati starts off like this:

    Updated spaces falan's space noshiespace KoRSaN HaCK™ chob's space facundo's space Mo Till The Cat arrr... Art N!tru »-(¯`v´¯)-» xE... breana's space More... [IMG]


    That's 20 identical blog posts, apparently. You'll (not) be surprised to find out that the text doesn't exist on any of the sites I checked that supposedly generated all those entries. I'd say it's a gaping hole in the way that Technorati checks pings (if, indeed, it checks at all).
  • Chris Edwards · 3 years ago
    There is another possibility. I administered myself a slap to the forehead when I looked at one of the other listings, for Myhurt at FC2 in Japan, and again at those for the MSN blogs - I realised that there is a clue in the phrase "updated spaces".

    It could be Technorati gaming themselves. I've gone into a bit more detail at my blog, but those results could come from a scraping script where someone forgot to tune out links in the boilerplate and other 'non-bloggy' parts of the page.

    The criticism about not including MSN Spaces etc in the Technorati stats may have hit home. And someone decided to do something about it without analysing the results before activating the production version of the script.
  • Carlos Domingo · 3 years ago
    The two Japanese blogs are not personal, they are in fact technology blogs/news sites, the first one is about keitais (mobile phones) and is part of a very well known site for technology news and the second one is Digg clone with Japanese news.

    CD
  • David Blanco · 3 years ago
    For those of you interested in checking out what's happening in the Web 2.0 world outside US. Check this: http://www.thenextweb.org
  • Abe Olandres · 3 years ago
    I wrote another explanation on the flaw of link stats (http://www.yugatech.com/blog/?p=606) about 3 months ago involving blogs in subdomains and sub-directories. Looks like the unique sites count has some bug.
  • Karl · 3 years ago
    Is it a bad thing that the Technorati 100 is evolving?

    It Technorati used the number of 'friends' some folks have on MySpace as an indicator of influence - well most independent bloggers would be left in the dust. Probably ALL of the well known ones.

    There are huge networks out there and just because they exist within the realms of MySpace, Xanga, and Livejournal shouldn't discount them.
  • Glenn Fleishman · 3 years ago
    Remember what Amazon.com's bestseller list was like in 1996. I dug it up:

    1. Creating Killer Web Sites: The Art of Third-Generation Site Design; David Siegel

    2. Executive Orders; Tom Clancy

    3. The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle's Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions; Scott Adams

    4. Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk; Peter L. Bernstein

    5. The English Patient; Michael Ondaatje

    6. Idoru; William Gibson

    7. Airframe; Michael Crichton

    8. Creating Great Web Graphics; Laurie McCanna

    9. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet; Matthew Lyon, Katie Hafner

    10. The Visual Display of Quantitative Information; Edward R. Tufte

    I believe Programming Perl was the bestselling Amazon book in 1995 (their first year of operation), but I might be wrong.
  • David Sifry · 3 years ago
    This was a bug that cropped up at the end of last week. We fixed it and now things are back to normal. Sorry about the problem.

    Dave