Monday, December 22, 2008

Singing the Technorati blues

I have been having an awful lot of trouble with Technorati lately and my emails to their support team have been met with a resounding silence. So now I turn to you to find out if anyone knows the solution to my little problem.

According to Technorati this morning, my blog was last pinged two days ago. Fine. However, according to Technorati, my latest post was this one, 17 days ago! All subsequent posts have slipped by unnoticed.

This has happened a few times over the past several months, and the only way I have been able to resolve it has been to get the Technorati team to look into it for me. This time even that doesn't seem to be an option.

And my rating is dropping like a stone into the bargain. I signed up for a Technorati account in order to be able to keep up with conversations in which I have been cited, so the rating issue isn't really important. However, since I had planned to use the information in my dissertation, I would prefer it to be accurate!

If anyone has any suggestions of alternatives to Technorati, in order to be able to keep up with conversations in which I am cited, I'm all ears. I'm fed to the back teeth with having to chase them for a manual update every so often. At the moment, I seem to be limited to the occasional narcissus-search, which means paging through umpteen mentions I already know about.

6 comments:

Stephen Downes said...

This happens to me too, has happened frequently over the years, and will never be fixed by Technorati.

It is caused, I think, by errors in their scraping service (Technorati does not use RSS, it scrapes HTML pages) resulting in it overlooking posts.

The upsycho said...

@downes Funny you should mention that. I have found that, on the odd occasion when you have given me a shoutout, Technorati doesn't pick it up. Fortunately, because I subscribe to your feed, I pick it up myself. But the greatest irony is that he-who-shall-remain-nameless who reblogs your stuff verbatim is picked up by Technorati. So when you give me a shoutout, Technorati registers his link to my blog! Go figure.

Anonymous said...

For tracking inbound mentions and links try setting Google Alerts.

Elaine said...

I second the Google Alerts route for finding references to yourself.

And have you tried using Google Analytics/Google Webmaster tools to track links into your content and also to track page views? It might not offer a one-stop shop for all the info Technorati provides but it might be a useful backup.

The upsycho said...

@Elaine I did load Google Analytics at one stage to harvest some quantitative data for my dissertation, but it slowed down the load time of my blog so much that some people were unable to view it at all, so I removed it.

Elaine said...

That's a shame. I think you can still use the Google webmaster tools without Analytics - it shows you who is linking into your site and to which pages they are linking. I don't know if it has the same performance impact but if you put the tag at the end of the page (not in the head tag), that might help.