Don’t even get me started on Technorati. The endless waiting while their servers churn along. The unpredictable outages. The bizarre way in which they organize the wealth of bloggy information they supposedly index.
But maybe I’m just taking this a little personally. After all, my haiku site, tinywords, fails to show up at all in technorati searches for “haiku.” This despite the fact that I’ve been publishing it for 5 years, it’s completely bloggy (RSS feeds, daily updates, and all), and the content couldn’t be more haiku-relevant. See for yourself: Nothing but haiku.
I registered the site with Technorati a few years ago, and when I check, it usually shows as being updated within the past 24 hours. I added Technorati tags to the site several weeks ago. I’m doing everything right here, folks! Yet if you go to the tag page for haiku on technorati, what you get is … what? A bunch of random blog posts. Some have haiku in them. Some don’t. Some aren’t even in English. And tinywords is nowhere to be seen.
Maybe I’m just sore, a soreness exacerbated by the fact that tinywords has never cracked the top 20 on a Google search for haiku. In fact, it peaked about 2 weeks ago at #23, and since then has been steadily sliding down to the 30s, then the 40s. The kind of crap that comes in above it is really mind boggling. Sure, I can understand the popularity, on the Internet, of the DeCSS algorithm rendered in haiku stanzas. Genius, really. And who can begrudge a bunch of geeks for boosting the PageRank of an ill fated effort to reverse-engineer BeOS? But what really steams my clams is the fact that tinywords gets a lower ranking than random-word haiku generators, spam haiku sites, Harry Potter haiku, and a sites that haven’t been updated in years.
Meanwhile on Technorati, despite daily updates to tinywords, the site never shows up. Even in a direct search for “tinywords,” there are no posts from the actual site until result #7 — and that’s a post that went up 37 days ago. 37 days!
So anyhow, Technorati: What’s the deal? Are you just mad at me because tinywords runs on my handcrafted content management system, not WordPress or Movable Type? Are you ignoring my site because I’m not pinging you via XML-RPC calls? Was it something I said? I honestly want to know here, because something seems to be really broken with the way your tags are working.
[tags]haiku, technorati, google[/tags]
I will do my part. I very much enjoy tinywords and will link to it (finally!).
How strange!
“Technorati Blues” appeared near the top when I clicked on your link to “haiku on technorati”!
Dad — ironic, isn’t it? In fact that popped up within an hour after I posted this item. Clearly Technorati is paying more attention to the Tweney Review than to tinywords.