Technorati just changed their look. They still haven't managed to get all the numbers to match up, yet, however. The number of links to my blog varies from page to page, and sometimes even on one page.
They have decent customer service, however, especially as the service they provide is free.
Yehuda
Showing posts with label technorati. Show all posts
Showing posts with label technorati. Show all posts
Monday, July 24, 2006
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Web 2.0 rants, and what I want for Web 3.0
Technorati
Basically, Technorati sounded like a cool idea. But, basically, it sucks.
What do I expect out of Technorati?
- That it ranks my site on a real time basis. Guess what? The site has one ranking when I'm looking at the list of blogs that I have claimed, and another ranking when I am looking at the blog page itself. And neither one gets updated more than once a month. A month!!! Maybe every two weeks. Certainly not every minute, that's for sure. And who can trust the result, anyway?
- That I could check sites linking to mine. Guess what? I can check some sites linking to mine, but not most of them. Tons of blogs, and they do have RSS, just don't get picked up by Technorati. And of course, anything that's not RSS'd doesn't get picked up.
- That I could find my own posts and other posts based on keywords associated with my blog or posts. Guess what? I can, sometimes. Sometimes it takes days to pick up new posts, however. By which time, the post doesn't appear in the search results until page fifteen.
- That I could view, um, any information. Guess what? I get this message more than 70% of the time I look for something: "Sorry, we couldn't complete your search because we're experiencing a high volume of requests right now. Please try again in a minute or add this search to your watchlist to track conversation." And I've been getting it for over two months. What the hell? What else do you do, Technorati, besides respond to searches? If you can't do that, why do I bother?
Blogger
What is going on with Blogger? Between the times it simply can't ping itself, loses my posts (not once have I been able to retrieve a supposed "auto-saved article"), can't republish my blog, indicates that there is no permission to view my blog, and so on. Sheesh.
And oh, yeah:
How do I access the pictures that I have uploaded?
Why can't I add tags, like every other blog site?
Why are the comment pages not formatted like my main site?
Why are the RSS feeds so slow in updating?
Why are 90% of your sites spam?
Del.icio.us
I've been there. I've created an account. I still have no idea how to find anything or do anything useful with it.
Whose bright idea was it that thousands of random people can make sense of the vast garbled tangle of the internet when it was thousands of random people who created this vast tangle to begin with? A thousand lists linking to a thousand pages are no easier to navigate than the thousand pages were to begin with.
Why would seeing someone else's bookmarks be any better than searching on a search engine? I may serendipitously find a good site? I can't do that by searching for key words?
BTW: I just tried to access it and it didn't load.
Google
Google, aside from sliding down the slippery slope into scumitude (China, video search, book search, privacy policies, desktop security, ad-sense bullying policies, etc...) is still crap, believe it or not. It's just the best crap that we have.
- Good luck finding something if you don't know how to use quotes and the exact right keywords. Or if you don't know English.
- Why do my search result show 1,200,000 pages returned, and then end after 3 pages? Even after I click "show me related pages"?
- How many millions of sites are still abusing your search results? A hundred people could manually go through 50,000 sites a day for a month and cut out half of the crap, or tag it as "not a page", "duplicate", "spam", and so on. You're not a government service, you are a private company.
- Searches that return different results if you change the order of the words.
- Duplicated results from the first page of results on the second page of results, and the third, and so on.
What next?
Ladies and Gentlemen: Web 2.0 is here and it's no different from Web 1.0 . Just a lot of losers stroking each other's egos that they're better because they can submit funny videos and create some interesting blog posts once in a while. Let's hope Web 3.0 is better.
What do I want out of Web 3.0?
I don't want to surf. My browser should be a pane with four boxes.
In the upper left box I search for other people/site snippets. Saved searches should give me back previous results first. The rest of it should be ordered by the type of information that I need. If I'm a college professor, I want to see academic stuff first. If I'm a music-a-holic, I want to see music sites first. And so on. And I want to be able to junk or pin sites for search relevancy. All results are snippets returned to this box.
In the upper right is my mail and my headline news. Buttons to let me filter and so on.
In the lower left I write, edit pictures or documents, and so on. Buttons to let me: mail, publish, save, and so on. Another which lets me select whom to let view and what tags to assign (otherwise, tags and permission are done automatically).
In the lower right I see an application: a picture viewer, a music tuner, new movie releases, a snippet browser, an IM client, and so on.
Naturally, I can expand one of the boxes to full screen, if I want to.
If I want to read what someone else has posted, I subscribe to their snippets by tag which come into my mail or my snippet browser. If I want to find what people have posted, I search for tags or text in the first box.
I want everything that happens in one box to make sense in the other boxes if I drag and drop. And I want to be able to export from any of these boxes to any format I desire, if necessary.
Is that too much to ask?
Yehuda
Update: some trackbacks for Web 3.0:
Web 3.0
What to expect,
Technorati tags: Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Technorati, Blogger, Google,
Basically, Technorati sounded like a cool idea. But, basically, it sucks.
What do I expect out of Technorati?
- That it ranks my site on a real time basis. Guess what? The site has one ranking when I'm looking at the list of blogs that I have claimed, and another ranking when I am looking at the blog page itself. And neither one gets updated more than once a month. A month!!! Maybe every two weeks. Certainly not every minute, that's for sure. And who can trust the result, anyway?
- That I could check sites linking to mine. Guess what? I can check some sites linking to mine, but not most of them. Tons of blogs, and they do have RSS, just don't get picked up by Technorati. And of course, anything that's not RSS'd doesn't get picked up.
- That I could find my own posts and other posts based on keywords associated with my blog or posts. Guess what? I can, sometimes. Sometimes it takes days to pick up new posts, however. By which time, the post doesn't appear in the search results until page fifteen.
- That I could view, um, any information. Guess what? I get this message more than 70% of the time I look for something: "Sorry, we couldn't complete your search because we're experiencing a high volume of requests right now. Please try again in a minute or add this search to your watchlist to track conversation." And I've been getting it for over two months. What the hell? What else do you do, Technorati, besides respond to searches? If you can't do that, why do I bother?
Blogger
What is going on with Blogger? Between the times it simply can't ping itself, loses my posts (not once have I been able to retrieve a supposed "auto-saved article"), can't republish my blog, indicates that there is no permission to view my blog, and so on. Sheesh.
And oh, yeah:
How do I access the pictures that I have uploaded?
Why can't I add tags, like every other blog site?
Why are the comment pages not formatted like my main site?
Why are the RSS feeds so slow in updating?
Why are 90% of your sites spam?
Del.icio.us
I've been there. I've created an account. I still have no idea how to find anything or do anything useful with it.
Whose bright idea was it that thousands of random people can make sense of the vast garbled tangle of the internet when it was thousands of random people who created this vast tangle to begin with? A thousand lists linking to a thousand pages are no easier to navigate than the thousand pages were to begin with.
Why would seeing someone else's bookmarks be any better than searching on a search engine? I may serendipitously find a good site? I can't do that by searching for key words?
BTW: I just tried to access it and it didn't load.
Google, aside from sliding down the slippery slope into scumitude (China, video search, book search, privacy policies, desktop security, ad-sense bullying policies, etc...) is still crap, believe it or not. It's just the best crap that we have.
- Good luck finding something if you don't know how to use quotes and the exact right keywords. Or if you don't know English.
- Why do my search result show 1,200,000 pages returned, and then end after 3 pages? Even after I click "show me related pages"?
- How many millions of sites are still abusing your search results? A hundred people could manually go through 50,000 sites a day for a month and cut out half of the crap, or tag it as "not a page", "duplicate", "spam", and so on. You're not a government service, you are a private company.
- Searches that return different results if you change the order of the words.
- Duplicated results from the first page of results on the second page of results, and the third, and so on.
What next?
Ladies and Gentlemen: Web 2.0 is here and it's no different from Web 1.0 . Just a lot of losers stroking each other's egos that they're better because they can submit funny videos and create some interesting blog posts once in a while. Let's hope Web 3.0 is better.
What do I want out of Web 3.0?
I don't want to surf. My browser should be a pane with four boxes.
In the upper left box I search for other people/site snippets. Saved searches should give me back previous results first. The rest of it should be ordered by the type of information that I need. If I'm a college professor, I want to see academic stuff first. If I'm a music-a-holic, I want to see music sites first. And so on. And I want to be able to junk or pin sites for search relevancy. All results are snippets returned to this box.
In the upper right is my mail and my headline news. Buttons to let me filter and so on.
In the lower left I write, edit pictures or documents, and so on. Buttons to let me: mail, publish, save, and so on. Another which lets me select whom to let view and what tags to assign (otherwise, tags and permission are done automatically).
In the lower right I see an application: a picture viewer, a music tuner, new movie releases, a snippet browser, an IM client, and so on.
Naturally, I can expand one of the boxes to full screen, if I want to.
If I want to read what someone else has posted, I subscribe to their snippets by tag which come into my mail or my snippet browser. If I want to find what people have posted, I search for tags or text in the first box.
I want everything that happens in one box to make sense in the other boxes if I drag and drop. And I want to be able to export from any of these boxes to any format I desire, if necessary.
Is that too much to ask?
Yehuda
Update: some trackbacks for Web 3.0:
Web 3.0
What to expect,
Technorati tags: Web 2.0, Web 3.0, Technorati, Blogger, Google,
Thursday, December 01, 2005
The 183,000 Technorati Blues
Matthew Gray complains about the lack of riches from Google's Adsense here. OK, he doesn't really complain about it, just notes it. I myself removed Google Adsense from my sites after they changed their policies in ways that made me unhappy, such as insisting that no other similar advertisements appear on the same page as theirs, as well as their liberal policies regarding disclosure of my financial information.
Sour grapes, really, since after many months I only stood to make $1.36 anyway, which I had to forgo when I canceled. If I had been making $100 a day, I suppose I could have lived with their policies.
Like the dirty word "profit" occasionally heard from game publishers, I don't think it's wrong for bloggers and so on to want to make money. On the contrary, I am spending a lot of effort to move into the game business full-time. I believe that the quality and volume of my game-related work would increase substantially if I didn't have to go out and make a living elsewhere. I do have a few major obstacles. Number one, I can't jeopardize my current income and profession, at least until I make a steady income elsewhere, or my wife does, or someone just forks it over to me. Number two, I won't do anything to aggravate my readers. While this is truly because of my high ideals and sense of community service, it may also have something to do with the fact that "losing a hundred readers" equals "losing all of my readers".
Of course, the main issue is that I have to provide something worth reading to my audience.
My Technorati ranking at 180,000 or so is sinking a few hundred each day, not because my blog is bleeding readers, but because other blogs are rising. I have a grand total of seven bloglines subscribers, compared to over a hundred for some more luminary game blogs. On the plus side, actual hits on my blog web page were high this month, partly due to my BGG.con reports.
Gone Gaming, the other site I write for, is ranked about 58,000 on Technorati, which is slightly more respectable. One might say that there is simply a limit as to how far you can expect a board game blog to rise in a blogsphere rules by Tech, News, Politics, Sports, Fashion, and Sex, but the truth is that some really weird blogs about esoteric subjects, like Shoes, are pretty high up the ranking. What do they have that I don't have?
Number 1: A lot of free time to write every day, mostly owing to the fact that they support themselves through their blog (note the vicious circle here).
Number 2: Nice pictures or charts. Exceptions to this are very rare.
Number 3: A sense of authority on what they write about.
Number 4: The "jeu ne sais quoi" - an appealing writing style and visceral ability to hook even readers who are not familiar with the subject.
Number 5: A few friends or loyal readers from bigger blogs, preferably at least one of the main ones, who have noticed them and linked to them.
That's the formula, give or take.
For myself, I am pursuing not only blogging but other avenues, as well. I have designed a game, I'm working on getting it published, and I'm working on other games. I have approached business initiatives on the feasibility of setting up a game store or cafe in Jerusalem (not until I can quit my job for a year). I run a game group and keep in contact with most of the gaming source in my country, and others around the world. And so on.
Success in what you want to do comes easy for some people. My wife is pursuing a PhD in Jewish texts as well as teaching, and she loves it. It's exactly what she wants to do with her life. The rest of us have to work a little harder. In the meantime, those of you who want to help me out can always donate to me via PayPal, if you so desire. Most of all, keep reading, keep linking, and keep the game world alive.
Yehuda
Sour grapes, really, since after many months I only stood to make $1.36 anyway, which I had to forgo when I canceled. If I had been making $100 a day, I suppose I could have lived with their policies.
Like the dirty word "profit" occasionally heard from game publishers, I don't think it's wrong for bloggers and so on to want to make money. On the contrary, I am spending a lot of effort to move into the game business full-time. I believe that the quality and volume of my game-related work would increase substantially if I didn't have to go out and make a living elsewhere. I do have a few major obstacles. Number one, I can't jeopardize my current income and profession, at least until I make a steady income elsewhere, or my wife does, or someone just forks it over to me. Number two, I won't do anything to aggravate my readers. While this is truly because of my high ideals and sense of community service, it may also have something to do with the fact that "losing a hundred readers" equals "losing all of my readers".
Of course, the main issue is that I have to provide something worth reading to my audience.
My Technorati ranking at 180,000 or so is sinking a few hundred each day, not because my blog is bleeding readers, but because other blogs are rising. I have a grand total of seven bloglines subscribers, compared to over a hundred for some more luminary game blogs. On the plus side, actual hits on my blog web page were high this month, partly due to my BGG.con reports.
Gone Gaming, the other site I write for, is ranked about 58,000 on Technorati, which is slightly more respectable. One might say that there is simply a limit as to how far you can expect a board game blog to rise in a blogsphere rules by Tech, News, Politics, Sports, Fashion, and Sex, but the truth is that some really weird blogs about esoteric subjects, like Shoes, are pretty high up the ranking. What do they have that I don't have?
Number 1: A lot of free time to write every day, mostly owing to the fact that they support themselves through their blog (note the vicious circle here).
Number 2: Nice pictures or charts. Exceptions to this are very rare.
Number 3: A sense of authority on what they write about.
Number 4: The "jeu ne sais quoi" - an appealing writing style and visceral ability to hook even readers who are not familiar with the subject.
Number 5: A few friends or loyal readers from bigger blogs, preferably at least one of the main ones, who have noticed them and linked to them.
That's the formula, give or take.
For myself, I am pursuing not only blogging but other avenues, as well. I have designed a game, I'm working on getting it published, and I'm working on other games. I have approached business initiatives on the feasibility of setting up a game store or cafe in Jerusalem (not until I can quit my job for a year). I run a game group and keep in contact with most of the gaming source in my country, and others around the world. And so on.
Success in what you want to do comes easy for some people. My wife is pursuing a PhD in Jewish texts as well as teaching, and she loves it. It's exactly what she wants to do with her life. The rest of us have to work a little harder. In the meantime, those of you who want to help me out can always donate to me via PayPal, if you so desire. Most of all, keep reading, keep linking, and keep the game world alive.
Yehuda
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