Now we’ve learned via Thomas Marban that the Technorati service hasn’t updated their “breaking news” home page in more than four days. Oddly it appears that blog posts are still indexing as my post about the Disney Monorail crash is listed as a “rising” story way at the bottom of the page.

There is news going on across the world (Palin, missiles, hot dog contests, etc.) so not sure what’s up with the homepage not updating in the better part of a week. It sure would be nice to get some positive news out about Technorati one of these days!

Here’s what the home page looks like currently – note the arrows pointing to the time:

There are some notes on the Technorati blog about a server move and yesterday’s post seems to indicate the issues are nearly resolved. Yet 24 hours later the site is still in the same “down” state. If you click on any blog, here’s what you are presented with:

 And here’s what you are presented with if you run a search (this one is for the iphone):

Quantcast shows Technorati with 7.2 million unique users worldwide. Perhaps they would have been better off taking the entire site offline during the move rather than leave a completely broken site live. Funny enough, the ads on the pages have loaded fine all along. I hope they are able to get the system back to normal soon as it seemed like they were getting some positive press as of late.

Steven Finch also wondered about the health of the ad network back in January after speaking with a few publishers. When I look at a random batch of sites listed in their directory, all I see are the same ads on every blog, including the Technorati site. And when I check out sites in the early adopter tech category, it’s also the same set of ads. It’s either the stomach (you know how I feel about this one!), acai berry or pc fix-it ads. Here are a couple of examples of the ads running on the Technorati ad network (this is actually 4 ads):

I spoke with one publisher who told me that the ads are run-of-network. I can only guess that they pay close to nothing and will probably require a click to earn anything.

Considering that Technorati is still regarded as a good place to see link counts (course many counts are wrong), I wonder why they don’t add the ability for blogs to share traffic between blogs. I’ve written many times about the need for discovery and instead of showing the stomach, the acai berry or the pc fix-it, I know if I was running their ad network, I’d rather show ads from other blogs I like. Darren Rowse talked about this method of getting more visibility today.

With so much unsold ad inventory, would you rather show the stomach or help promote other blogs which are promoting yours? I know my answer. Paid ads should always come first but when a paid ad isn’t available, let the publisher choose to display the stomach or ads from their whitelist of sites. I would totally offer up a 125x slot on CN in a rotation with other tech sites I like. (perhaps we should do this anyway!)

I’d be interested in hearing from CEO Richard Jalichandra on how the ad network is doing these days.

Update: Check out Technorati search posts today from Louis Gray and Steven Hodson.

If you are a regular reader of CN, you know that there are few companies I love more than Technorati. Yesterday the service was down for a period of time (apparently the monster escaped) and previously I wondered if Technorati was as good as Alexa. I’ve reached out to the Technorati team a few times but never hear back.

But gosh o golly was I excited to find today a new Technorati site when I loaded it up just a short while ago! There’s more green now as all of the links are green, fonts are a bit smaller and there’s a bunch of Google ads jammed up in there. There’s "all new" Technorati tag pages to help you navigate the Web.

On the positive tip, it looks like the top 100 list has been pushed under the blog navigational tab. Maybe Jalichandra is finally reading CN and realizes there’s more than just 100 blogs online today.

They appear to be pushing their "rising" categories even more on the homepage now — I guess this is because of Google Blogsearch’s changes to their homepage.

I don’t think there was anything wrong with the old site — I would have spent the time on answering customer service emails and making sure the current system works 100% rather than putting some polish on the site. In these tough economic times, it’s the core that will help businesses succeed.

Please report in if you are also forbidden from viewing the site due to lack of permissions.

Update: now Technorati is noting that some "monster" has been let loose – perhaps that’s why my count is always wrong!

Doh! The Technorati Monster escaped again.

We’re currently experiencing backend issues and are working to resolve them as quickly as possible. We apologize for the inconvenience and appreciate your patience.

What’s interesting to me is that Technorai can’t seem to get their counting mechanism in order but they are certainly willing to issue a "state of the blogosphere" report. This past June Technorati launched an ad network. For those of you in the ad network, are the impression counts correct?

I’ve tried working with Technorati on and off since I started CN to get their counting mechanism to be accurate and at least display the same number at all times. This seems to be impossible. Let’s move to the current time and allow me to share why I believe Technorati is Alexa 2.0.

Two weeks ago I attended the Wordcamp NY event and posted a video from Matt Mullenweg’s keynote about the future of Wordpress. The post has received a good number of links so I wanted to see what would happen with my Technorati authority score. On October 11th, CN was at 1,287 authority with a rank of 1,561. While I’ve always believed this is low, I’ve given up trying to get them to correct it. Yesterday I checked my score again and the page displayed 1,283 authority and 1,540 rank. I noticed that the latest stories displayed were two months old so I hit the "ping" button. Boy was that a mistake! Immediately my score dropped to 1,029 authority and 2,194 rank. So within less than a minute, I lost over 600 ranking slots.

Here are some examples that I grabbed over the past 24 hours on a variety of blogs and the discrepancies in their rankings:

Here are two screenshots taking minutes apart for CN:

On the left is the DaringFireball main results page and on the right is the "top 100 blogs" – notice their rank at #95 in the top 100 and #226 on the main results page. We see this with nearly every blog in the top 100.

The Inquisitr – a week ago Duncan noted that he was excited that he passed the 1,000 mark (lower number is better). I don’t think he will be that excited to learn he has lost 1,600 ranking slots in just a couple days – oh wait, on refresh you get another score.

I’ve always said that Technorati has servers that aren’t updating correctly because if you hit refresh enough times, you can see all sorts of different scores. Just like Alexa, when this ranking algorithm is wrong, it affects the income of blogs that are incorrectly ranked. If a company wants to buy an ad campaign on a blog with a rank lower than 1,000 and I incorrectly show up at 2,200, it means a loss of revenue.

I am working on additional ranking analysis looking into the raw counts which I hope to have completed by the end of November. For now, let’s hope that Technorati will actually take a look and get this problem resolved. I’d be happy to try to help Technorati get these issues resolved.

The current "seller expectation" on the auction is 25,000 Euros or $40,000 USD. If you are interested in the auction, it’s being held on Sedo.

The site features a very interesting geo-location map which shows bloggers by location. Click a blogger and see his or her latest posts.

Technorati continues to disappoint me with their inaccurate blog scoring and their poor blog search. I still believe half of their servers are not updating properly. Sometimes when you visit a blog’s stats page, you get nothing, sometimes you get a higher score than "normal" and other times you get half of the page.  

Dan Frommer reports that after the announcement the Technorati service went down from massive traffic. He believes that many people went to the site after many years of ignoring it, assuming it was dead.

CEO Richard Jalichandra seems to do a good job of hitting the party and event circuit so perhaps that helped the company to receive the funding. Last year I wrote a column at BlogWorld about Jalichandra where I said he "blew it." Though on the positive side, he did try to friend me on LinkedIn last month. Last year, I even offered the company five suggestions to immediately improve Technorati.

Perhaps Technorati and Alexa should merge?

Technorati has announced

I am pretty sure I would never use my Technorati profile to authenticate as an OpenID provider, but it’s a good marketing bit. It’s a good way to show that your profile could be used in this manner — something many might not know about (I didn’t). Technorati also began supporting OpenID for profile creation in October 2007.

Another update they have made over the past day which I do find beneficial is the addition of a URL link on the authority pages. In the past, some of the headlines linked directly to a site, but the majority of the time, the story linked to the site’s Technorati profile. This was a huge frustration factor for me as I want to see what the site says about me or a client, not the site’s profile page. Now (as shown below) they have the link to the profile and directly below it the full URL linked to the actual site. Bravo!

No idea if the Technorati team had anyone externally test and review the new version but it certainly doesn’t appear that way. Dorion/Richard, any input here on how you developed the new version?

One of the questions I had was around the section on the right called "Contributing bloggers". I wondered how those blogs got listed. Molly thinks it’s random – which I don’t agree with after seeing "Fergie’s Tech Blog" listed on there every time I visit the page since launch.

Check out Molly’s video – it’s a better demo than mine and explains the updates pretty well.

Technorati

There are some good updates it seems – like moving to show the hot posts around the net, etc. I’ve gone through the service and the only word that comes to mind is: CONFUSION. I even created a video to demonstrate my confusion – it’s below.

• What’s the difference between a blog and a news site?
• Why is does it say "percolating the latest blog posts" but then talks about news stories?
• What is an attention link and how does it differ from a reaction?
• What is a contributing blogger? Is it someone who writes content or someone who works for Technorati?
• Are these top stories or rising? If rising, how does one appear here? Some of the top stories in each category have one link. Are these hand-picked by Technorati or is it algo-based?
• No feeds for the categories?

Can Technorati regain it’s foothold in blog search and ranking? Leave your thoughts in the comments after you watch my confusing video.

I hope we get some clarification from Technorati as to what is going on with these link counts and how they will affect authority figures since those are based on six-month figures. Please report in if you are seeing the same thing on your site. So far I have tested 10 sites and all are in the same ~30 day link display period.

Wouldn’t this have been a good topic to discuss along with other planned changes at BWE? 

First a note. Moderator Jason focused almost the entire time exclusively on Pajamas and b5media. Third place for mic time went to AOL and last was Technorati. This made it a bit difficult for Richard to discuss Technorati’s plans but I believe he had a responsibility to speak up. This is the first part of how he blew his chance to win us all over.

Technorati gets bashed almost daily by someone and I have written about my dislikes in the past as well. From their inability to count links, to 0’s all around, to the WTF, everyone is wondering what’s up over there. Richard continued to leave us wondering what’s in it for them. While leaving the room, another attendee commented to me, "Who cares about Technorati anymore?". Maybe it’s no surprise that the large Technorati booth was empty most of the time.

The little that he did speak (along with his blog posts) made one thing clear: he is most interested in the Top 100 and their opinion of Technorati. He tried to back up but wasn’t able to do so even saying, "most of you in this room are included in the Tecnorati databsae." Most of you? Why would anyone attending this conference not be included? This makes absolutely no sense to me.

In business, it’s important to treat your best customers best. We did that at my previous employer. But why would a blog at number 30 be more important for Technorati than a blog at 30,000 or 3 million? The higher rated blogs aren’t "helping" Technorati’s bottom line any more than the other blogs are.

Richard, I sure hope we will hear more from you on what Technorati’s plans are besides only showing interest in the Top 100 and removing posts after 6 months. It would be good to see Technorati succeed and to turn around the negativity that is the current Technorati vibe. Perhaps you could start with my 5 Quick Suggestions for Improving Technorati.

Suggestion #1 – Focus on the house

In an interview with Wired, Richard said his goal in the next year is to "build a WUME (wholly unique media experience)". I would suggest Richard take some time personally (not using interns) to review all of the current feedback from bloggers across the spectrum about their thoughts on Technorati. Richard can start with our Technorati coverage over the past year. The current "house" is not in order – counts aren’t correct, blogs aren’t updated correctly and there are lots of other small issues which seem to frustrate the blogosphere. Fix those first Richard as more positive bloggers talking about Technorati will help your WUME, otherwise it will hurt your chances.

Suggestion #2 – Realize that you track x million blogs

In your first blog post Richard, you mention going to the Top 100 and asking for advice first. What about the other x million blogs you track? The top 100 is not a sales contest with you discussing revenue projections with your best salespeople. Goes back to what I said in Suggestion #1 above – you’ve got a branding issue – something more than the Top 100 are needed to fix. Especially since the Top 100 might not even be correct given the tracking issues :)

Suggestion #3 – Kill off the WTF immediately

I hope you kill off the WTF feature of Technorati. Since Topics was added, WTF is not needed, it’s a joke among bloggers and appears to receive very little traffic and votes per story. Not to mention that a large percentage of the submitted stories are spam and porn.

Suggestion #4 – Upgrade the Customer Service

In my customer service test last year, Technorati scored the lowest with an F overall. Recently when I inquired about a few topics, the autoreply said basically, "we are busy, if we can get to it, we will. If we don’t, feel free to nudge us and we might possibly reply". Richard, I would suggest you do some anonymous testing yourself to verify the level of service provided.

Suggestion #5 – Create incoming tracking alerts

One of the small features I’d love to see is a way for an alert (sms/email/twitter) each time someone links to one of my stories. This is different than the alerts that Google provides and could become a good way to drive blogger traffic back to Technorati. Offer up a nice widget and a Facebook application as well and it’s a way for visibility for your brand. Allow me to create the same alerts for my brand competitors.

Quick Conclusion

As you can see, all of my suggestions will help lead to greater blogger acceptance levels. Improvement in the blogger acceptance level is critical before rolling out new features. It’s time for you to join the conversation and since you are fresh meat, it’s a great time. Good luck Richard and I look forward to watching your journey back.

Update: Dave at Scripting News has published the entire current Top 100 – CN made #39! Looking at the list also brings back the debate of what is a blog.

TechCrunch has the exclusive on a new feature launching today from TechMeme called "The Leaderboard". Mike notes, "The list will be created based on the blogs that created the most headlines on Techmeme over the previous thirty days (so it will change frequently)." You can also check out our 5 suggestions for improving TechMeme.

There is some discussion from Mike and others that this will affect Technorati but I am not so sure I agree with that. As Darren Rowse points out on the TC comments, "it is a great way of measuring things in a niche – however as it only looks at blogs writing on technology it misses 99% of the blogosphere."

Only headlines will be counted in the "Presence" scoring – “the percentage of headline space a source occupies over the 30-day period.”

Mike also notes, "I think this is a much better way of ranking the very top blogs than the Technorati approach. Technorati has deep flaws, for reasons stated above. Techmeme, by contrast, has zero spam and tends to mirror what the tech blogosphere is writing about perfectly." Except that at a basic level, Technorati is not biased as TechMeme is.

Yes, TechMeme is a great tool, I check it out several times each day and it is absolutely a great way to see what the tech blogs are writing about. Many times, I use it as a research tool for the articles I write. 

What does this leaderboard actually do? Remember that TechMeme is not unbiased. It pushes the sites that Gabe believes are the biggest or most influential by default (whether by human or by algorithm). So for example, let’s say XYZ site breaks a story and 5 others write about it including 2 of the "TM Faves" – those Faves have a much better chance of pushing out XYZ site as the headline and thereby capturing that bit of the "Presence" score. In fact, if you want to talk about gaming, any of the TM Faves only has to write a story about any topic already on TechMeme to obtain a great chance at another headline presence score addition.

Marhsall Kirkpatrick has a more objective review than Mike’s which includes, "That’s a fine thing to measure in 30 day increments, but it’s also important to acknowledge that not all blogs are equal in Techmeme. It is a black box, but it certainly appears that some big blogs carry a whole lot more weight than others. If my personal blog links to some one else’s blog post, that post will not be shot onto Techmeme. If TechCrunch, Engadget or Read/WriteWeb link to some one’s blog post, the journey for that blog post to make it to Techmeme is going to be a whole lot shorter."

He is right but he is missing the point. If discussion doesn’t count, then his personal blog won’t get the points once RWW posts about the same thing. It’s all about float fellas and ladies and if anyone thinks this list will change every 30-days, they are surely mistaken. 

(and fyi, I have no idea if CN is included in the 100 or not)