After their mutual masturbation stunt, Technorati has now introduced the "Jerk yourself off" list(s). Here's how you get on their new list(s):
1. Get a bottle of Technorati lubrication (ie Technorati Tags)
2. Apply said lubrication to hand and stroke keyboard.
3. Secrete words. Slam publish button.
Walllah. You're on their new list(s).
So... In case you didn't get the metaphor. Or can't get passed how lude it is...
Technorati introduced tags a long time ago. When you publish a post, you can add a tag. The tag links back to technorati and helps technorati (or anyone indexing a blog) determine what topics (ie tags) the individual post is discussing.
I've never done it. Don't plan to. I hear people can get a lot of traffic from it. But, I have officially moved passed the overt build-traffic-for-the-sake-of-building-traffic phase of my weblogging.
So, now Technorati has introduced a searchable directory of blogs based on these tags. The only problem is that my tags don't have to be relevant to what I post.
Example. (I guess that is not a good example, actually.)
To make this post somewhat constructive, I should suggest some better ways of accomplishing this. Maybe the next generation of blog categorization (and I do think this is a very important thing) could take these suggestions into account:
1. Let editors tag posts. Del.icio.us comes to mind. So, does Pubsub's new fashion list.
2. Automatically extract keywords from blog content. So, unless I start inserting the word, "masturbation" into sentences randomly, I won't be self labelled the authority on it.
While we are at it, I am also an authority on greek warrior godesses hair pieces, new york bankruptcy lawyers, egyptian wall sockets, harvey wall bangers and last but not least: your mamma. Long live my reign!!!! (or atleast until some clever spammers figure the system out.)
There is a tremendous difference between the "First-person" in-content tagging that Technorati promotes and the "Third-Person" tagging that del.icio.us, furl, and others promote. The biggest difference is in the motivation of the tagger. An author, who tags in the first-person (i.e. "I wrote about..."), is primarily interested in attracting an audience and only secondarily interested in the "accurate" tagging of posts. On the other hand a third-person tagger ("He wrote about...") typically doesn't care about the size of the author's audience. A third-person tagger is much more likely to be primarily interested in using tags as a way to organize information.
The problem, of course, is that potential readers and searchers are much more aligned with the interests of third-person taggers than they are with the authors' first-person motivations. Given this difference, third-person tagging will inevitably result in much better results than first-person tagging.
bob wyman
Posted by: Bob Wyman | September 11, 2005 at 02:11 PM
Very well said, Bob!
I am thinking about the list. I was hoping it would be DIY, so I wouldn't have to do it all at once.
I am thinking Pete Caputa's list of cronies, which would be all the bloggers that I scheme (or collaborate) with.
Posted by: pete caputa | September 11, 2005 at 07:47 PM
I think Bob is mostly right, with one exception. I categorize all my blog posts, but I don't do it for T'rati, I do it mostly for myself. It's done in much the same fashion that I would use delicious. The problem is, not everyone uses categorization in this way...delicious, etc., is a much cleaner and efficient way to get this done.
This kind of stats stuff sounds like something we should add to our Groups app, which is DIY. And I hope I make it onto your list of cronies!
Posted by: Greg Gershman | September 11, 2005 at 08:39 PM
You are definitely on the list, Greg.
The stats would be very cool if you added it to your groups. Does pubsub have an API for that stuff? (I assume you have similar data, but I imagine Pubsub's index covers a bit more of the blogosphere?)
Posted by: pete caputa | September 11, 2005 at 09:05 PM