Vario Creative Blog

Technorati has for years provided blog search and blog authority ratings.   They’ve traditionally been known for having technical glitches, from their site tending to be slow, or completely down.  But for the most part, bloggers adopted them as the de facto measurement tool for how well read blogs are.

Since their recent update, in which they revamped how they rank blogs, as well putting a shiny new look on their site, things appear to have headed down hill.

First off, a look at their support forum, where I, alas, have spent more time than I’d like trying to get this blog to update and to find out why the system has completely stopped workin for me, will show you that they’ve got some problems that are obviously systemic.

The numbers of people who can’t ping their service, which tells technorati there is a post to index, and allows them to check for links to other blogs (the currency of their blog authority ratings) are legion.  To their credit they appear to be trying to get people fixed up, one by one, with their admins reporting “we made a small change and you should be all set now.” 

The thing is, we’re far from all set.  Even if the system begins to work again, which I currently doubt will be the case, the way blogs are rated is utterly broken.  Not the system, but the logic behind the system.  Here’s why:

•  One size fits all – We should not care how our blog rates against all other bloigs, but more importantly, we ought to care about how we rank within our niche.  Blogs like BoingBoing and Instapundit will always be top blogs, and let’s face it,  most of us aren’t really expecting to compete with them.
• Trackbacks are dead – which means that as a measure of popularity, links are a tenuous commodity, however right now, they’re all we have.
• All things are not equal – There ought to be a measure of relevance in all things.  Saying that a link from a Splog (an automated blog grabbing content and reposting in hopes of generating adsense revenue) is the same value to me as a link from a Seth Godin or the like is ludicrous.
• Links are inside baseball – While I’m not willing to write them off, links from other marketing or web design bloggers are kind of self-referential.  Shouldn’t there be a component of traffic and more importantly, quality traffic, in how blogs are rated?

I hope Technorati can fix their problems.  If they can’t there’s room for someone else to swoop in and do it better.  Hmm…maybe I should get coding….

If you blog, you no doubt already are aware of the huge problem that blog spam represents.  Few of us who have been at it for any period of time haven’t had the awakening moment of logging into our blog to find we’ve got 200 or more new comments, all about teen boy sex or viagra.  The same problem exists for forums, and it’s often worse there.

These are automated comments which have been posted by a mindless bot someone unleashed to help increase their SEO efforts. 

So the other day I noticed a post asking for information about a product called XRumer.  A really novel approach – as most bloggers or forum administrators (the same problem exists there) would probably google up and answer and post it.  Then the clowns got an inbound link of relatively high value, as it is in the proper context.

So I read the description.  They claim they can auto post to any forum or blog software, and they include a database of 102,000 blogs and forums for you to spam.  They also claim they can get by virtually any defense, including captcha, javascript and even the question-answer solutions.

From the Xrumer site:

The system is fully user-independent and requires minimum skills to handle: you only need to choose the proper links database, create a message text with one or several hyperlinks and hit the ‘Start’ button. THAT IS ALL.

But here’s the kicker:

In no way XRumer acts like a spam-bot since spam is defined in legislation as ‘unsolicited email’, whereas XRumer simply posts messages created by users, which cannot be illegal providing the user does not violate the legislation by provoking racial hatred or anything prohibited by the law. Besides, in most cases XRumer is smart enough to find sections like ‘Flood’, ‘Off topic’, ‘Flame’, ‘Chit-chat’ where advertising takes place with the permission from moderators and webmasters. XRumer is not an email spam bomber and should not be confused with such software. The laws of USA, Russia, Canada, Spain, Germany, France and other countries explicitly state the illegal nature of email spam which XRumer has nothing to do with.

A pox on your house, XRumer… 

If this isn’t illegal now, it needs to be outlawed.  This is the sort of thing crap that is bringing the Internet to it’s knees.  Also, despite their protestations that it is illegal and “free speech,” they offer no physical address, which is generally a sign of someone trying to avoid litigation.  I have literally spent hours deleting crap generated by this and other programs like it.   And I can assure you it is not free speech if I am forced to pay the hosting fees and bandwidth for them to post their drivel.

At Reel-Time, I’ve finally had to resort to moderating all new users for their first 10 posts – any off topic junk and they get banned.  It’s at least keeping the stuff off the forum, and denying them even a moment of benefit.

(By the way, my blog spam filter caught 43 spam comments between last night and this morning.)

I spent most of the last week debugging things for IE 7 and generally changing the way most of the sites I’ve developed handle CSS (cascading style sheets).  To put it mildly, I am not an utterly happy Microsoft client today.  Let me share my pain.

Standards are standards, and we’ve had the approved spec for HTML and XHTML for sometime.  Is it too much to ask that IE 7 should work with existing standards-based code? 

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David Churbuck had a great post about domain squatters today, which is definitely a must read…he calls it the “bottom of the online marketing barrel.”

It’s a bigger issue…if you have children.

I sat last weekend next to my daughters, 7 & 8, as they surfed.  At that age, spelling isn’t exactly a strong point.  As they moved around the heavily branded sites they like, such as http://www.postopia.com (Post Cereal), bratz.com, barbie.com, disney.com, they often mispelled the url.  Each time I had to interject “STOP”…

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