Publishing 2.0 - Latest Comments in Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically

Re: Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically

David Sifry — Mon, 24 Apr 2006 10:44:53 -0000

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

Re: Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically

Glenn Fleishman — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 19:38:37 -0000

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.

Re: Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically

Karl — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 18:05:15 -0000

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.

Re: Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically

yuga — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 15:03:46 -0000

I wrote another explanation on the flaw of link stats (http://www.yugatech.com/blo... about 3 months ago involving blogs in subdomains and sub-directories. Looks like the unique sites count has some bug.

Re: Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically

David Blanco — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 12:40:58 -0000

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

Re: Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically

Carlos Domingo — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 12:32:21 -0000

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.

Re: Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically

Chris Edwards — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 12:14:57 -0000

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.

Re: Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically

Chris Edwards — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 10:37:31 -0000

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 Ã‚Â»-(Ã‚Â¯`vÃ‚Â´Ã‚Â¯)-Ã‚Â» xEuNiCex Ã‚Â»-(Ã‚Â¯`vÃ‚Â´Ã‚Â¯)-Ã‚Â» at Technorati starts off like this:

Updated spaces falan's space noshiespace KoRSaN HaCKÃ¢â€žÂ¢ chob's space facundo's space Mo Till The Cat arrr... Art N!tru Ã‚Â»-(Ã‚Â¯`vÃ‚Â´Ã‚Â¯)-Ã‚Â» 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).

Re: Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically

Chris Edwards — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 09:53:48 -0000

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 MÃ‚Â¥$Ã…Â¤Ã„â€ºÃ‘ÂÃ„Â¬Ã‡Â¾Ã…Â©Ã‚Â§ Ã„Â¢ÃƒÅ½Ã‘â€œÃ„Â», 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.

Re: Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically

Seth Finkelstein — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 09:47:56 -0000

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.

Re: Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically

Matthew Hurst — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 09:38:59 -0000

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).

Re: Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically

Mark Devlin — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 00:42:55 -0000

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/t...

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).

Re: Technorati Top 100 Is Changing Radically

Ted — Sat, 22 Apr 2006 00:26:57 -0000

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.