Comments on: Top 50 P-12 Edublogs? – Technorati shakeup

By: Greg Cruey

Greg Cruey — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

I would not have thought of Twitter use as a factor in declining authority ranks. If anything, I was hoping for synergy between bloging and tweeting.

Wonder how long it will be before someone comes up with a way to factor in how often your page comes up on Twitter (despite the tinyurl format).

By: Miguel Guhlin

Miguel Guhlin — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

I know exactly what to attribute my decline to–a switch in domain names for my web site. I’m no longer updating the address at http://www.edsupport.cc/mguhlin, I’ve switched from mguhlin.net to mguhlin.org.

What’s really funny is that the old edsupport site is still getting 400-600 visitors with 100 hit limit that Statcounter has for a free account. On a lucky day, the new site (mguhlin.org) gets 100-200 hits…and that domain hasn’t quite taken hold either. Technorati says, “Huh?” everytime I search on it.

Take care,
Miguel

By: Nicholas

Nicholas — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

Hi Mr.McLeod,
I read your comment on Mr.Dembo’s blog. A tip I would give to bloggers for there posts is to leave questions in your posts so commenters have an easy thing to comment on.

By: Alec Couros

Alec Couros — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

What is most bizarre to me is that JUST last night I came back to your last ranking post as I was wondering what was going on with my technorati rating, and was wondering if it ‘was just me’. When I was clicking on the numbers, I realized it was not.

I blame Twitter. I don’t have research to back that, but I have no doubt.

By: Sue Waters

Sue Waters — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

Much of what we are seeing definitely relates to how Technorati is indexing.

During the Comment Challenge (http://commentchallenge.wikispaces.com/) we used technorati tags to pull the posts together so participants could check out the latest posts. Technorati struggled to index many of the blogs and participants often had to manually ping Technorati. Meanwhile probloggers are also noticing how it is impacting their rankings.

Does it all really matter? In the big scheme of life probably not. Being a scientist facts just fascinate me. For my own personal blog it’s not surprising there has been a huge drop when you consider I also now blog at The Edublogger (http://theedublogger.edublogs.org/). Besides the challenge of writing posts for two blogs; it creates confusion for readers as to which blog to link to when they mention my name.

By: Jason Priem

Jason Priem — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

I like your up/down lines for visualization of the changes. I was thinking of throwing together an animated, color coded vis of your data; I wonder if you have a spreadsheet or table with the data (so it doesn’t have to be entered by hand…)

I actually just finished a project using your June Top-50 list; it’s an animated, interactive tagcloud for the blogs’ feeds over time (I think I may have emailed you about it, actually; if so, sorry for the repetition). Now I’m wondering if I could integrate these authority numbers as well…

By: Justin B.

Justin B. — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

Has anyone thought to check whether Technorati’s policies have changed and whether that is impacting these numbers? Seems to me the most obvious explaination is not increased Twitter use, but instead a change in the indexing system.

As I have said before, I dislike the Technorati authority mechanism as an indicator generally, but here is a specific case of why it is bad because you have a limited number of people, even if it is open source, developing an authority system that seeks to be a substitute for the true market – when the true market seems to work just fine if we allow ourselves to be alright with a small degree of uncertainty. Technorati is U.S. News in a different package.

Last note: Scott, I thought you might be interested in this site because it seeks to put a monetary value on website URLs based a some different factors than Technorati uses. Here it is for your page: http://www.websiteoutlook.com/www.dangerouslyirrelevant.org

By: Alfred Thompson

Alfred Thompson — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

I have seen my ranking drop in half. Someone at Technorati told me that it was because a lot of older links were aging off and I think that is part of it. But a larger part of it is that I suspect that changes at Technorati mean that fewer new links are getting added. I see links that Google alerts reports to me that never show up at Technorati even if I ping manually. I also think that Technorati cleaned out a lot of old spam blogs which is probably (in principle) a good thing even though in practice some of us have seen that result in lowered authority rankings.

On the other many maybe my blog has just started to decline because of me. It could happen.

By: Cathy Nelson

Cathy Nelson — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

I have never really trusted Technorati. The seem to change the rules on a whim. And they seem to trust links on other bogs I read/follow that in my book are nothing more than veiled spam. I don’t want rank or authority from spammers. Oh well, I dont read folks based on their tehnorati rank or authority anyway, and some of my faves didn’t make your list. That does not mean I will abandon them and add these to my already too full reader. And actually some of these are on my growing list of “disliked” blogs. They have forgotten the blogosphere and instead only think of themselves and their inner circle. I read to learn, not read to stroke an ego. Just my thoughts. (Confession though–I am fascinated with those who can crunch numbers and then try to apply logic to it. So you remain high in my list of faves.)

By: Steve Dembo

Steve Dembo — Tue, 30 Nov 1999 05:00:00 +0000

Offhand, I’d say I fall into a similar category to the K12 Online Conference in some sense in that I think I owe some inflated statistics right now due to the 30 Days to Being a Better Blogger challenge. Traffic, comments and posts are significantly up right now due to it. It’ll be interesting to look at it again in June and see whether the trend holds true.

Regardless, if nothing else I think your research truly demonstrates how difficult it is to find quality metrics related to the blogosphere. Subscribers, rankings, and even traffic can all be equally unreliable. And in my opinion, the best measure to what the best blogs are is still your own gut instinct.

That being said, I’d still rather be on your list than off of it! Yes, I do have the ego of a middle schooler