Archives for posts with tag: google

Have you heard the Buzz? As I’m always at the forefront when it comes to adopting the newest internet technologies I’ve of course signed up already. Have you? If so feel free to add / follow me and I’ll most certainly reciprocate. At the moment I haven’t found a whole lot of people to follow and interact with, which will of course leave more or less each and every social web service useless.

I will offer some insight on the service and what I think of it here at the blog once I’ve fiddled around with it for long enough to get a solid impression of what it’s like.

google wave logoJust a short notice, if anyone is still looking for invites to Google Wave, I have a few to spare. Anyone who wants one can just leave a comment. Just be sure to use your “real” e-mail address in the field for it, because that’s where I’ll be sending the invite.

Technorati LogoWhile I am by no means the first to voice my concerns over Technorati’s recent demise, I think it is yet again time for someone to point out how they have completely wasted the once so promising position they found themselves in.

Although their services have been everything but fully functional for the past few months, I have continued to go back, hoping that they would soon be restored to their former glory. But now I am officially giving them up, and declaring them dead to me at least. What was once a useful tool for bloggers in order to track the growth and popularity of their blogs, has now been reduced to waste.

Disagree? I present you with a small list of evidence. Granted these are things that could easily be rectified by the Technorati team, but the lack of interest they have shown in the past couple of months for actually doing so, leads me to believe that they have even given up themselves.

  • Blog posts are not being indexed properly. While indexing many millions of blogs and what they write about is no small task, a service that gets its bread and butter from doing it, should be able to pride themselves by doing it in a reliable fashion.
  • As an extension to this, their whole service is completely unreliable, in particular the search function and the favorites function. The latest posts from my favorites frequently disappear, only to reappear but then not up to date at all.
  • Result? WordPress have dropped Technorati when displaying the most recent reactions to your posts, and now uses Google’s Blogsearch (the large keep growing).
  • Authority is not being updated at all across the board. Just have a look at this thread in the Technorati Support Forums, which was started a month ago, currently has 32 replies and still no response from the staff.
  • Although it has been criticized for being to easy to game, this of course makes the Authority function completely useless, as it no longer reflects any accuracy of a blog’s popularity at all.
  • With Authority not being updated, and reactions to your own blog posts not being indexed properly, it is as the headline states, completely useless as a tool for bloggers and keeping track of what happens around their own blog.
  • The search function is worthless because posts are not being indexed properly.
  • Technorati is now crap, and I will never use it again.

Well that last statement is a tad angry-fanboy-ish, especially seeing how I am avid supporter of Technorati and the services they provide for bloggers. It was an excellent tool for keeping track of the blogosphere, and in particularly staying up to date on the community around your own blog.

I also loved the fact that a simple start-up like Technorati is, was able to get a firm stronghold over this position, compared to the alternative, which is as we are seeing right now, that a giant corporation like Google is taking over another important part of the web. Unfortunately, because of all the problems at Technorati and no end of them in sight, I am now forced to turn to Google with my blog searches as well.

And just to top it off, I give you a screenshot of what the reactions page to this very blog looks like as of now:

No Authority

Now that is a lot of reaction from many unidentified blogs with no authority at all. Excellent, if the staff over at Technorati keep this up, it will not be long before we have to go the the Internet Archive to be reminded what Technorati used to be!

If your feedreader looks anything like mine, you’ve probably seen nothing but posts about Google hammering the PR of a lot of high profile blogs down to what seems to be deceitfully low levels compared to the actual authorithy these blogs have worked for a long time to build.

A feasible theory about what’s actually going on is that the good people over at the big G are simply readjusting the algorithm that determines a site PageRank. While this makes sense, one can only wonder why it has only affected certain sites, while others have been left untouched. This quite obviously means that they are just adjusting certain factors within the algorithm. ProBlogger for instance previously enjoyed a comfortable PageRank6, but now only has a 4 (in most datacenters, anyways), while my old pet-peeve Zelda Universe, which has been at a PageRank 5 forever, remains unchanged. The same goes for Techcrunch and their monstrous PageRank 8.

One theory that was presented by Andy Beard is that they are heavily punishing sites that are part of larger networks that practice a lot of cross-linking between their properties. It certainly seems like a valid theory to me, and to be quite honest, I support it. The message they seem to be sending is that it shouldn’t be any easier for large networks to build authority for their new sites simply by passing the juice from their already established sites.

While most that have been hit are throwing hissy-fits about the changes, I for one am encouraged by this. To me it simply means that Google are trying to level the field, and sending a message that if you want credibility from them you have to build it through natural links. Being part of a larger network doesn’t necessarily make you any more of an authority than the independant blogger that sits alone without a large network to back him up.

While this isn’t directly related to Net Neutrality, we know that the principle has always been important to Google, and some might even say that this could be a way of promoting just that, and as I said, trying to level the field and make it easier for the independant publishers to get a their toes in the game.