T w e n t y S i d e d
What the heck? Yesterday one of the “top 100” blogs linked to my terrain project series. I’ve been watching the Technorati listing of this site, curious to see what sort of effect this would have and who would blog about the terrain project. (In 24 hours my rating hasn’t changed. Strange, but whatever.) Then I see this:
So that’s the problem. I haven’t updated my blog since 1970. That explains it. Geeze, you’d think that in the last 36 years someone would have linked me.
I signed up for Technorati so I could see when people linked to me. If someone is trying to start a conversation, it’s helpful if I know about it so I can respond here or in their own comments. If someone links me, I don’t want to ignore them. So far Technorati doesn’t seem to be working as intended. Metafilter linked me yesterday and Technorati didn’t notice. Someone had to tell me in my own comments. Mefi is a big site, how could Technorati miss it? How many other sites am I missing? If they miss MeFi, then lower traffic sites like Kaedrin Weblog, Chizumatic, and Tales of the Rampant Coyote aren’t going to register at all, and they are exactly the sort of sites I’m looking for.
Something like this needs to just work, or its useless. I was really into the idea when I joined, but every time I visit TechRa it has little ads for stuff like “Who are Joe Q. Policy Wonk‘s Favorite Blogs?” There are millions of blogs in the world and the whole thing seems to go out of its way to shine the spotlight on the top couple dozen. That doesn’t do anyone any good. I’m not doing politics here, which means the blogs that interest me are WAY down the list. I need to know who’s reading my stuff, and I don’t care what the popular kids are doing.
Trackbacks are flakey and prone to spam. Technorati is a buggy popularity contest. Is there some other way to know who’s linking you? Since I have my own domain name I can use the site log files, but sites will only show up if they send a noticable ammount of traffic my way. Again, small sites will get lost in the noise, and small sites are going to be the ones that most interest me.
This doesn’t seem like it should be so hard. Is there some tool or site that I’m missing?
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Technorati has been acting very weird, very often. Hopefully in a few days thing will be back to normal, but if not, you might want to try emailing them. It’s not the first time that I read about this kind of thing…
I’ve never been particularly impressed with Technorati. An excellent idea in theory, but they’ve always managed to screw up the execution (in my experience, at least). I just checked my profile, and it seems that my blog no longer exists (I claimed it 3 years ago), though searching for Kaedrin yields most links to my site (including several “spam” sites, which is another reason I tend to avoid Technorati). I generally find out when people link to me by checking my Sitemeter account. I love Sitemeter, but it has a lot of limitations. Still, if someone links me, I can generally find out by checking the referrals there (much easier than using the log analysis packages). I’ve been meaning to check out Google’s stats package as well… but Technorati’s never worked for me (plus, I don’t get linked that often – thanks by the way:)
Wouldn’t this actually be a Technoranti?
(makes a run for it stage right, ducking tomatoes)
It’s a shawme you don’t have a donate button! I’d definitely donate to this outstanding blog!
I suppose for now i’ll settle for bookmarking and adsing
your RSS feed to my Google account. I look forward to
fresh updates and will talk abolut this site
with my Facebook group. Chat soon!