{"id":156,"date":"2006-07-06T08:45:00","date_gmt":"2006-07-06T15:45:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.red-sweater.com\/blog\/156\/technorotten"},"modified":"2006-07-06T13:58:33","modified_gmt":"2006-07-06T20:58:33","slug":"technorotten","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/156\/technorotten","title":{"rendered":"Technorotten"},"content":{"rendered":"<style type=\"text\/css\"><!-- .caption { border-style:dashed; border-width:1px; border-color:#BBBBBB; margin-left:20px; padding:10px;}--><\/style>\n<p><div class=\"caption\">Update: Just a couple short hours after posting this entry, Technorati did in fact come to my rescue. I&#8217;ll be damned, it worked! Many thanks to Janice Myint for causing such a swift resolution to take place.\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n<p>\nChances are if you&#8217;re reading this blog you&#8217;ve heard of <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/\">Technorati<\/a>, the leading service for &#8220;adding up all the links&#8221; to the millions of blogs in the world.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThere&#8217;s a mass joke of referring to the site as &#8220;Egorati&#8221; which is totally true and totally funny. Basically, it becomes addictive to go look at your own listing on the site and see whether your &#8220;rank&#8221; has gone up or down. I don&#8217;t really need it to see who&#8217;s linking to me, because I use <a href=\"http:\/\/www.haveamint.com\/\">Mint<\/a> and that tends to catch things a lot more thoroughly and quickly than Technorati. But I still want to see my ranking!\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe ranking has more than just ego-stimulation purpose. It helps you to get more readers who are looking for what you happen to be blogging about. While my ranking will never put me in the <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/pop\/blogs\/\">Top 100<\/a>, there are many categories for which a relatively modest ranking will earn you a top billing for the category. So while I may not make it to the <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/blogs\/Apple\">Top 5 Apple Blogs<\/a> with <a href=\"http:\/\/daringfireball.net\/\">John Gruber<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.43folders.com\/\">Merlin Mann<\/a>, there are other categories where I should be able to stand out a little bit.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nTake for example the <a href=\"http:\/\/technorati.com\/blogs\/Cocoa\">Top Cocoa Blogs<\/a>. There are some real recognizable names in there. <a href=\"http:\/\/inessential.com\/\">Brent Simmons<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/stevenf.com\/\">Steven Frank<\/a> lead the category, but in contrast to the astronomical linkage numbers of Daring Fireball or 43 Folders, their blogs are actually &#8220;within my reach,&#8221; at least in terms of Technorati ranking.  While I am nowhere near as popular or significant as either of those two men, my <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/search\/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.red-sweater.com%2Fblog\">numbers add up<\/a>. Even by Technorati&#8217;s current measurement, I should come in at third place in the Cocoa rankings, but I don&#8217;t show up at all. Why?\n<\/p>\n<p>\nMy entire Technorati existence has been plagued with bugs from day one.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nTake a look again at <a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/search\/http%3A%2F%2Fwww.red-sweater.com%2Fblog\">my page<\/a>, and you&#8217;ll see that Technorati thinks my blog hasn&#8217;t been updated in 78 days. This is in spite of repeated attempts to &#8220;ping&#8221; them with news of my changes.  The bugs are deeper than that. Even back when it appeared that they noticed my updates from time to time, they would never &#8220;hook me in&#8221; to the Blog Finder results. I&#8217;ve configured my blog with a bunch of keywords, including Cocoa, but my listing never shows up. My content is also not being indexed. Take a popular recent blog of mine, the &#8220;Apple phones home&#8221; one.  If you type the phrase into Google, you get my page as the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.google.com\/search?client=safari&amp;rls=en&amp;q=%22apple+phones+home%22&amp;ie=UTF-8&amp;oe=UTF-8\">first result<\/a>. Type the same thing into Technorati, and you get a bunch of <em><a href=\"http:\/\/www.technorati.com\/search\/%22apple%20phones%20home%22\">other blogs<\/a><\/em> talking about my entry, but my entry itself is nowhere to be found.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nBecause I&#8217;m stuck in Technorati bug land. I&#8217;ve been there for several months and I can&#8217;t get out. So why am I complaining to you, the reading public? Because I&#8217;ve tried too many times with Technorati and received no reply or even acknowledgement that they&#8217;d look into it. So I figure in this crazy new world, maybe my only hope of <em>getting in touch<\/em> with Technorati is to actually write about them <em>on my blog<\/em> and let them somehow find it. Ironic, but it might just work?\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI understand that Technorati must face a huge support dilemma. But if they&#8217;re going to simply not respond to support requests, it would be better to take the option to submit them off the page. When you submit a request ticket at Technorati, you get an automated email which contains the first sign of rotten-ness in the form of this sentence:\n<\/p>\n<p><div class=\"caption\">\nIf you don&#8217;t hear back from anyone within a few business days then please let us know and be sure to include the subject and ticket number, &#8220;[Feedback] Web Contact: Blog Finder #33035], &#8221; in your note so we may properly track your issue and its progress.\n<\/div>\n<\/p>\n<p>\nTranslation: &#8220;support requests regularly get lost and go unanswered, so the onus is on <em>you, the consumer<\/em> if you actually want this to be tracked responsibly.&#8221;\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI&#8217;m no expert, but if I was building a business, I would see this as a <strong>huge, red flag<\/strong>. If you have to build your apology for bad support <em>in to the automated response<\/em> then somebody is doing a terrible job or you haven&#8217;t hired all the people you need to in order to conduct a proper business.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nThe first couple times I submitted requests, I just waited patiently. Who am I to presume that my little indexing problem is worth rudely following up on the request. I&#8217;ll just wait it out. Surely they&#8217;re working on it. After a couple months or so I decided maybe their system requires you to actually go through the follow-up phase to turn into a &#8220;real ticket.&#8221; I responded to one politely and noted that things hadn&#8217;t been improving. No response.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI give up on your rotten support system, Technorati. It doesn&#8217;t work. It&#8217;s a black hole. Nobody responds and it <em>makes me feel  like an idiot<\/em>. It&#8217;s rotten! You&#8217;ve got a great system and a great site but if you can&#8217;t patch up the mistakes then it&#8217;s worthless to me, and misleading to your customers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Update: Just a couple short hours after posting this entry, Technorati did in fact come to my rescue. I&#8217;ll be damned, it worked! Many thanks to Janice Myint for causing such a swift resolution to take place. Chances are if you&#8217;re reading this blog you&#8217;ve heard of Technorati, the leading service for &#8220;adding up all [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,19,4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-business","category-technology","category-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=156"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/156\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/redsweater.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}