The RSS Blog

News and commentary from the RSS and OPML community.

Dave Sifry called me today. First to tell me that they fixed my account, so that I can finally login again. It's been more than a year since I was able to use that account. Second, he also wanted to know what I thought was wrong w/ Technorati. I tried to explain to him that the indexing takes many days, weeks and months. It's kinda hard to explain over the phone, so I told him I'd write up some examples. So, here they are...

First, check out my link cosmos for my iBLOGthere4iM blog. Currently, there are four recent links.

  • Luciano posted this entry in November, but Technorati picked it up only two days ago.
  • Mike post this entry two weeks ago, but Technorati picked it up only three days ago.

Half the recent links are not timely, that's not a good sign. But that's only the reported links. Let's now look at Blogline's citations and see how many entries Technorati is missing. I'll just list them...

I wonder if Scoble's linkblog pings Technorati. That might explain those two, but I wrote WongDude's blog, so I know it pings Technorati.

These same results can be found using The RSS Blog. Again, looking at the link cosmos for The RSS Blog.

  • Satunnainen posted this entry a week ago, but Technorati picked it up only yesterday.
  • Chris posted this entry over a week ago, but Technorati picked it up only yesterday.

Now let's look at my posts. I just wrote a post called Google Sucks (except at search). I'm definately pinging Technorati (or at least I'm trying to ping Technorati). But this entry doesn't appear in the uxuf link cosmos.  Anybody wanna guess how long it'll take before this entry appears in Sifry's Alerts link cosmos, if ever? It definately didn't take the two or three minutes claimed by Technorati.

Hopefully, this is enough information to convey to Sifry what I mean when I say that Technorati is broken.

With all this documented, now it's time to thank Sifry for re-enabling my account. I already created two watchlists; for the iBLOGthere4iM blog and The RSS Blog.

TechnoratiUpdate: I was just visiting Sifry's blog and I noticed that Sifry's last blog entry has one trackback, which happens to be from me. I suspect this is what kicked off Sifry's phone call. But then I noticed there was one Cosmos link. I wanted to find out if this also was mine and clicked on that link. Technorati responded 3-5 minutes later with the page at right. I then tried a few of the Cosmos links on his blog and they all responded similarly. I have to admit, I was surprised, Technorati response times were generally getting better during 2004.

Reader Comments Subscribe
Randy,

Thanks again for taking the time to let us know about the problems you've been noticing.  We're working 110% to get those issues resolved, and having the best data quality is our total goal.  I'm sure we'll be in touch if we have any questions, but again, THANK YOU for helping us locate the issues. 

Dave

Dave,
You've gone a long way to replacing Feedster and Bloglines as my services of choice.

Randy

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