Technorati Issues Apology for Problems with Data IntegrityPosted by an Honored Guest The following is an excerpt of an apology issued yesterday by Adam Hertz, Vice President of Engineering, Technorati:
STRUMPETTE RESPONDS, CALLS FOR AN INDEPENDENT AUDIT Of course, we appreciate Technorati’s apology and their cooperation. That said, we want to underscore the seriousness of this situation. It has been a very difficult 4 months. Bottom line: This situation has caused us irreparable harm. Valuation of internet properties is cumulative. People read popular sites and tend to avoid less trafficked sites. Through Technorati’s negligence, a large percent of our articles could not, and will never, be found or read. As a consequence, our readership has suffered significantly. Most importantly, we can never get back that traffic or the opportunities that traffic would have generated. That said, this situation raises two sobering issues the blogosphere needs to consider. It's all about data integrity and the perception of impropriety. For those serious about all things social networking, Technorati’s numbers are absolutely considered gospel. However, it is our understanding that the numerous ongoing technical issues there make their numbers variously unreliable. Making matters worse, we are very concerned about the Edelman-Technorati Deal and the subsequent perception of impropriety. In the announcement of the deal, Edelman PR's CEO Richard Edelman said, "Technorati provides the best analytic tools for tracking over time and in depth what the blogosphere is talking about. Today, Technorati and Edelman announced that Edelman will have an exclusive right to offer Technorati's analytic tools [in various languages]... continuing into early 2007." Edelman, whose Me2Revolution "gang" has openly and often expressed sharp opposition and hostility toward Strumpette, is in bed with the very company accounting for our traffic. Again, we’ve been struggling with this problem with Technorati approximately since the Edelman-Technorati arrangement was announced. THEREFORE, today we are calling for an independent audit of Technorati and the Edelman-Technorati Deal. It is in the wake of continuing concerns over the operations at Technorati, dramatically compounded by Edelman's public admissions to the recent scandal for corrupting the blogosphere, that this is now an imperative. We hope the blogosphere joins us in demanding that the audit take place immediately. Bookmark This
 Comments
Display comments as
(Linear | Threaded)
I have been complaining about the link count for months and months and continue to get the same non-answers. And I also believe that it causes harm and puts me at a distinct disadvantage when compared to say, someone from Edelman whose tags seem to index before he even hits send while mine take hours and every third post never indexes at all....and my link count decreases as my links increase.
So, I am happy at least to see an admission of a problem...even if it wasn't mine. And the relationship between Technorati and Edelman is quite curious.
wow. Yet another interesting, and apparent conflict of interest, given the recent Edelman/Technorati partnership. Funny how the most powerful technology tools of the blogosphere, when in the wrong hands, can be potentially manipulated against their primary intention. Thanks and kudos for drawing attention to this latest possible transgression. I'm sure it would have gone unnoticed otherwise.
I'm baffled by your indignant - almost sanctimonius tone. It's almost as if you have a special relationship with technorati - one where you pay them for a service which they have failed to provide?
is that the case - or are you simply making use of a free service, which in this case malfunctioned?
No Nick... you miss the point completely.
Technorati is an index of a market. 1. The numbers are incorrect, i.e. we are questioning data integrity broadly. If there is no data integrity, you don't have a market. 2. Edelman, and the apparently perception of impropriety, distort that market and make the game unfair. Pretty simple to be "baffled" about. - Amanda
Marianne, do have a read of Brian's original post on link counts:
http://technorati.com/weblog/2006/10/127.html bear in mind that ranking is based on links from distinct blogs in the last 180 days. Multiple links from the same blogs don't count. As we have explained to Strumpette, if through some parsing problem we are not indexing your posts, that doesn't affect us finding other people's links to you, unless they are suffering from the same rare parsing bug. Strumpette, I can't make sense of your point 2. As far as your point 1 goes, when we find flaws in our indexing and counting we fix them, and always appreciate bloggers who take the extra time to help us discover and isolate them.
Kevin,
With all due respect, your explanation to Marianne is a fantastic example of pathologic. Indeed, you are correctly reporting numbers THAT YOU HAVE HAD A ROLE IN ERODING! As we said above, "Through Technorati’s negligence, a large percent of our articles could not, and will never, be found or read." People CANNOT LINK TO ARTICLES/SITES THEY CANNOT FIND! As to the perception of impropriety, any financial relationship with the supposed independent standard of a system is out of bounds. It's why Pete Rose is not in the Hall of Fame. Either directly or indirectly, Edelman gets preferential treatment and that distorts the marketplace. Here, if Rubel had had the issues we have had with your system, would it have taken 4 months to fix? The answer is no. - Amanda
kevin,
For me it is a multifaceted issue...and it has gone on for a year. I have not gotten a satisfactory answer. I know this because I still have the same problems. I am totally underskilled to discuss spiders or parsing and frankly I don't really want to discuss these things....I will just say that I do know that approximately 1 out of every 4 posts that I write never make it to technorati. To me that means that I write a post, tag it so that those with an interest in the topic can find it and read it. I have a small blog and I don;t have aspirations to be in the technorati 100...i write about topics that interest me and I tag them so that like minded/interested people can find my posts and read them if they so chose. So I get really frustrated when I have to start emailing the ever pleasant Janice Myint to say, whoops, where did they go this time. So, problem #1....by not getting indexed in Technorati, many of my posts are never read. And correct me if I am wrong, how does someone link to something that haven't seen. I think Amanda covered this above. Now for the links themselves...of course being without my own parsers and spiders I really don't know exactly how many links I get, but common sense tells me a few things.....for instance (and I will note that I thought Janice told me 90 days not 180 days was the magic number) although I am not widely read, my feedburner subscribers are consistently increasing; the traffic to my sitemeter is fairly consistent; also I do have my moments when I know that I am getting lots of links.. I write a post that is widely read or I am someplace, such as a conference and getting additional traffic because of that or if someone writes a post based upon something that I wrote....it just seems odd to me to see my link count decrease. It also seems odd to me that I have so many emails referencing power outtages or technical problems in response to my inquiries that don't seem to effect others posting at the same time. There have been issues with 2 urls, multiple feeds, and suggestions that there were problems with my code; each time I have tried to make corrections and been told things were being corrected from your end. But at the end of the day, my links continue to decrease and some of my posts disappear into a technorari black hole. As I said, I think it puts me at a disadvantage in getting read....the more you are read, the more you are read, I think is the concept. Marianne So...
Despite their apology, as of today Technority continues to use Strumpette in their explanation of how link counts work as an example of a blog whose links are falling: "Strumpette's link counts have been falling for the last week. Bummer."
It may be that this example is now based on accurate data. However, if the apology is sincere, you would think they would find another example to use.
Hmmm. Since posting the above, Technorati has stopped responding to pings from my blog. Hmmmmm.
And since I posted THAT, have started again. (Probably coincidence. A person can get paranoid.)
Add Comment
|
A few weeks ago,
I’m almost in shock: Technorati admitted on their blog that they sometimes don’t index sites properly: The good people at Strumpette contacted us [… ] told us that we hadn’t been processing updates from their blog for a few mon...
Tracked: Oct 26, 02:48