Joho the Blog
An Entry from the Archives

Yes, Blogline may have duplicate listing. But Technorati has issues nonetheless.

Technorati has also been compared with Google and Yahoo. There seems to be a demonstrable, repeatable skew in its rankings.

The service appears to harvest web pages rather than RSS or Atom. Consequently, in some cases at least, it lists blogroll entries as links, each blogroll entry counting multiple times if it appears with a given post.

Technorati relies on pinging, which favours software that pings automatically.

Technorati appears to favour sites that link back to technorati. It appears to favour sites that use Technorati tags (I don't have numbers to prove this).

In my own case, the number of sites and links is very suspect. These numbers remain static even though new links are actually displayed by Technorati. Sometimes they decline. Technorati reports my site as not having been updated (once for as many as 400 days) even when I ping. The number of links (972 links from 647 sites) has remain unchanged for more than a week, despite the new listings that do appear.

Links I know exist, from sites that Technorati harvests, such as this one, never appear in the listings. Pubsub (at least until its hiccup a week ago) routinely lists many more links, unique links, than Technorati.

Scoble's complaint stands. Technorati's listings are unreliable.

Who cares how many links a blog has? The quality of the debate is what matters. You can have a lot of links, like Scoble, and not have good quality debate or you can have fewer links like Buzz Machine or even Tom Peters and have a much richer and more interesting conversation with people.

But what elite high priest of the blogiverse can measure and report on something as subtle as the quality of debate to be found on a blog? Much easier to form a links club and/or mutual admiration societies.