RSS feedEvery now and again I’ll use engines like Technorati and Feedster to look up references to some of my posts. And most times, particularly with Technorati, they suck.
Today I went looking for references to my The definition of videoblogging as a genre post on Technorati. Typing the subject straight into the Technorati search box, gave me a bunch of links to my post, including Jay and Michael’s sites, but my original post was not included in the list.
Thinking it might a problem with my site, I checked my RSS, and it validated fine, and my feed is still validly specified in my HTML (head). So I checked my claiming on Technorati, and not only did they say my blog has been claimed (by me), but that it had been updated only 12 hours go.
So I tried a whole bunch of other word combinations to see if it would appear. It did not. I am being excluded from Technorati for some reason.
If that weren’t bad enough, today they have an advertisement on their right side panel which I’ve seen on a few other sites. Or should I say heard, because it speaks to you, asking you to type a phrase into a box and have it spoken back to you, and then provides the embedded code for you to use it on your own site. For starters, one of the golden rules of the web, is don’t use sound unless the user has specifically allowed you to. The reason being that some computers are used in quiet environments. Technorati of all people should understand this.
And is it just me, or is their site so much more difficult to use these days? Why would you put the words “Sign up” and “Sign in” right next to each other in the header? Surely you’d use different terms to indicate the differing functionality. Do they actually employee a user interface specialist?
Technorati still sucks, although they keep managing to fool venture capitalists. We’ll check in again in another six months.