Technorati Considered Harmful

[First published on GOTO XO as Technorati considered harmful on December 19, 2007.]

I just came across Matt Mullenweg’s post 4 Ways to Get Banned from the Technorati Top 100 courtesy of Sam Ruby’s planet.intertwingly.net.

This came as news to me, and sad news, too. While Technorati is not itself open-source it does aim to provide a service to many people, including open-source programmers such as myself.

If Matt’s charges are true, and I see no reason to doubt them, then Technorati is failing to live up to a fundamental credo of open-source: Give Credit Where Credit Is Due.

Though I have been listing my Technorati Rank and Authority numbers on this blog and my personal blog, I will delete them forthwith.

My first blog, The Wayward Word Press (TWWP), has achieved quite a high ranking, due to the over six hundred posts I have published in the last fifteen months and the links to it from others that are measured by Technorati.

My newest blog, and the one closes to my heart these days, is this one, GOTO XO.

I have been republishing my XO posts to TWWP to take advantage of of its higher rating, in the hopes that will lead more viewers to the XO blog itself. I will continue to monitor the Technorati rankings privately, and will suspend the dual publishing when GOTOXO’s rank is sufficiently high. After all, Rank doth have its privileges, even if not fairly measured.