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YahooDave Sifry announced his resignation from Technorati today. John Furrier at PodTech.announced that James McCormick would be the new CEO. Skype has been down all day; while online trading at Charles Schwab's site and the telephones were down all morning according to Eric Savitz at Barrons. Coincidentally the stock market.was also down. Again.
Yesterday, there was a little management shift at Facebook.. Kara Swisher called it a corporate two-step but then noted today that the dancers were all men.
Is there a meaning in all of this beyond roller coaster tycoon?
Jason Calacanis says he hears a pop (mini pop) and believes the 4th quarter is going to be ugly in Web 2.0 land. Henry Blodget posts that the stock market correction that we seem to be in will make venture capitalists more circumspect in their investments and fuel advertising spending cutbacks..in other words.
Om Malik , Stephen Baker at Blogspotting, and Pete Cashmore at Mashable among others blame Google Blog Search. for the problems at Technorati. Michael Arrington takes Sifry to task for his apparent lack of empathy for the eight dismissed Technorati employees and self appointment as a great leader.
Well, he did have a little habit of viewing Technorati as the President of the Blogosphere as he proclaimed the State of the Blogosphere not once but twice a year. Not sure about his concern for the eight employees, although he did express it. And he expressed it as a human being, "today we also say goodbye to eight of our team members.;" not in the corporate vernacular of "restructuring" or "downsizing".
I have had ongoing problems with Technorati on my blog with tag indexing, links, and the latest, Technorati Authority and never received a reasonable explanation as to why I was always" losing links in this 90 day cycle." Finally I stopped looking until my move from Typepad to Wordpress caused me to confront the mess once more. And yes, quite a mess it was courtesy of Typepad's url and Technorati's....uh, math?
Given that Technorati keeps lowering my authority, and this Technorati vested authority counts for a lot on lists that I am never on (not even the Z-list) I will unauthoritatively continue to question Technorati's authority and algorithm.
Technorati measures inbound links that their "spiders" happen to find and calls it authority. Well, actually, Technorati tells us how much authority our blogs have. And does anyone else have a problem with that?
As Mary Hodder, formerly of Technorati, expressed in her authoritative series on link counts and blog search several years ago (hey, I can have an opinion on authority on my blog just as well as everyone else) ,
"What I love is that people who read blogs are assessing them over time to see how to take a blogger and their work. But more recently, as I said, I'm seeing these poorly done reports floating around by PR people, communications companies, journalists, advertising entities and others trying to score or weight blogs. And after hearing the degree to which people are upset by the obtuseness of the top counts, and because they do want to monetize their blogs or be included into influencer ranks, I'm at the point where I'd like to consider making something that we agree to, not some secretly held metric that is foisted upon us."
OK, so....is this the Ides of August? Well, are there any Delphic Oracles in the blogosphere?
Tags: Technorati, Dave Sifry, Mary Hodder, Jason Calacanis, Z-list, Viral Garden, Mack Collier, Om Malik, Pete Cashmore, Michael Arrington, Typepad, Wordpress, Henry Blodget, PodTech, Media2.0, Facebook, Charles Schwab, Skype, Eric Savitz,, Stephen Baker, Kara Swisher
Hey! you've been following
Tish G August 17, 2007 - 1:49pm
Hey! you've been following ths same stuff as me! ;-) and if it doesn't make ya laugh, it can give you a serious headache...
First, Arrington cracks me up--I thought his take on the whole thing was a tad self-righteous. Then again, I sometimes think Arrington and I have similar traits that way, so I don't take his inventory too much...
And the Facebook thing! Kara's post had me in stitches--but the thing is, she's *very* right about that. I chalk it up to the Nerd Factor. I used to know a bunch of young guys who, when about the same age as the Facebook guys, had a video game company. The only woman was the office manager who was something like a geeky momma bear, who went home every day at 5 and left the guys there to party on. When you leave a bunch of guys alone, they tend to do weird things, eat very bad food, and indulge in habits that would make most women's hair stand on end (like, not bathe for a couple of days straight...and leave Playboy magazines open on the floor.) So, whether it's tacit neglect of women, or intentional, may be difficult to figure out--but you might bet that some of these guys are unfortunately hanging the "no girls allowed" sign on the door because they wouldn't know what to do if a woman invaded their space....
But still....as far as Technorati goes, I've been surprised the number of posts on the story have been touting the superiority of Google's blog search--which never gives authority nor links. When I questioned someone about that, he brought up the trackback thing. Ah, the "T" word! Trackbacks are great for post links, but not permalinks....but I think some folks really don't care all that much about permalinks anymore because of RSS subscriptions.
yikes! things have changed!
Tish Grier
blogger/consultant/writer
currently with Assignment Zero--blogging at
the Constant Observer