If you build it, and Technorati doesn't track you, will they come? [updated] [updated]
Update: I'm inserting this text at the top of the post so Technorati can see it. This is to claim "my blog" here: Technorati Profile
I think that, given the incredible activity on BlogHer these past few weeks, the answer is undoubtedly "yes." (As I write this, there are 1046 members, 2737 posts and 1805 links added to the blogroll [with over 100 more pending approval]).

But I have to wonder about Technorati and their inability (or unwillingness?) to track BlogHer. What prompted me to write this is that, as I was adding BlogHer to my Technorati faves list, I saw that Technorati did not have any up-to-date info on BlogHer.
I manually pinged Technorati but after some 20 minutes now, still no change.
(And this isn't nearly as bad as seeing our business site listed as not having been updated in 186 days! Granted, we don't blog there every day ... it's been a few weeks now ... but the last posts were earlier this month! Anyway....)
Some might ask: Why not say Technorati schmechnorati! and be done with it? Do we all need the A-list mentality, as Jory asks? Is mobilejones right? Does Technorati even matter in this MySpace world?
At this point, I have to laugh at myself, because I noticed all this while participating in Technorati's latest popularity measure -- which is very undemocratic, tends to mainstream traffic, and generally rewards the already-successful. And here I was excitedly playing along! (Aren't I the disruptive little blogger now?)
Still, when the question remains, "Where are all the women bloggers?" -- the best answer is right here, on BlogHer, in the blogs written by these amazing contributing editors, and in the blogrolls. Of course, list obsessions are a big deal for some bloggers -- and was a topic in last year's conference. And so, by the way, was Technorati's apparent blindness to women's blogs in general. Yet, as Charlene Li noted last year, people pay attention to lists. Maybe we shouldn't sneeze at them.
Subverting the mainstream is part of the disruptive nature of the long tail -- and the Cluetrain will win out, in the end. But part of "success" -- which, in this case, we can consider being noticed -- comes from gaming the system, and while we may pooh-pooh such gimmicks and tactics when it comes to our own blogs, it behooves us to do the little things that can add up to a slightly improved collective visibility. (And I know, we want to get the pretty buttons going, too! Soon!)
So here's a link which adds BlogHer to your faves list (if you are registered there):

Maybe if enough people do this, the Technorati boys can't help but notice that there's a living, breathing website here. (Will this post change things, as public pleading did for Alexandra?)
(ps - And no judgments, please, on my other faves. I was just getting started when I saw what it said about BlogHer.)
Update March 1, 6:43 a.m. PST:
Reading my post in the light of day, I see that it comes off much snarkier than I had intended. I did not mean to imply dark or nefarious reasons for the slow tracking, and really wanted to plug Technorati's new faves list as a way to promote BlogHer.
As mobilejones notes in a comment below, BlogHer is being tracked very well by other search engines and trackers. So perhaps I'm being unfair to Technorati in the title. Still, they have the brand recognition, so we -- I -- want to figure this problem out.
The BlogHer listing is now only slightly out of date. This could be because of my manual pinging of Technorati last night -- perhaps there's a couple-hour delay these days. (Alas, manual pinging has done nothing for the plight of the pingVision site.) But with a site as busy as ours here, manual pinging is not an optimal solution.
For the geek-minded reading this, this site automatically pings Technorati with every update, but does so through ping-O-matic. In an email, another web developer wrote me suggesting that perhaps the problem is with ping-O-matic. I don't know, but I will be trying to contact both today.
Update March 1, 4:03 p.m. PST:
Earlier today, I heard back from Technorati:
I've taken a look at the issue regarding picking up your pings for "www.pingv.com" and "blogher.org". After making a small
adjustment, I've sent our spiders to revisit your pages and your blogs have been indexed with your most recent posts.
http://technorati.com/search/attention?from=http://pingv.com
http://technorati.com/search/something?from=http://www.blogher.com/
Everything now appears to be working as it should, but please let us know if you experience any problems in the future.
She suggested that someone claim BlogHer for their Technorati account. I explained that the site is a community, not an individual's blog, so claiming doesn't really make sense -- unless we wanted to claim our individual blogs. We'll see what they say. I really don't know if multiple people can claim one site, or if it makes sense for the BlogHer community, but I thought I'd share the suggestion here, fwiw....
I'm very encouraged by Technorati's response.
Comments
Email?
Have you considered sending an email to David Sifry and just asking him? Also, do the other Blog search engines track Blogher?
Btw, I just checked Feedster and they are tracking Blogher. Perhaps, other blog search engines are too. And the most important search engine, Google, has recorded over 5 mil pages related to Blogher.
What concerns me more than a Technorati connection is the nearly zero referrals that Blgoher has delivered to my blog. I could count on one hand the number of referrals that have come from the new site. My comments on the old Typepad location resulted in more traffic than my participation as a contributor to this one. Any thoughts or insight into why this would be so?
Debi Jones
Contributing Editor, Blogging and Social Media
Feed your mobile jones
Alas, I don't have his email
The Technorati site has a contact form, so I'm using that.
As for the referrals, I know it's not ideal but having a custom signature in html handy in notepad to paste into the bottom of your blog posts might help. Unfortunately, while Drupal allows for automatic signatures to be set for comments, it will not place them into the blog posts. (I'll look into that -- maybe it's an easy mod. Configuring profile data to appear is another possibility. As I work on the custom profile pages, I will look into hooking some of that code into the blog templates.)
Laura
· BlogHer website admin
· pingVision: Drupal theming, design, development and hosting
· personal blog
As the blogher site does
As the blogher site does work opposite to how Technorati does work (and also other sites like that) it is no wonder that there are no links back from blogher.
Technorati does only track links from the blog frontpage and in this sense it is sensible to use the claim blog tool to use it for "claiming" the frontpages. Also there are built in tools which can be taken advantage of then.
So one should not wonder why no water comes out of the faucet if it is not turned on ...
Nicole Simon
BlogHer Contributing Editor, Blogging & Social Media
Technorati said to me today
CORRECTION:
If you are a contributing editor, your own blog is linked at the bottom of each of your posts (i.e.,
http://www.blogher.com/[membername]/bloghttp://www.blogher.com/blog/[membername] ). That would be the URL to claim. It wouldn't hurt to ping them with that URL, too. That's at http://technorati.com/pingLaura
· BlogHer website admin
· pingVision: Drupal theming, design, development and hosting
· personal blog
Claiming individual blogher blogs
I decided to give it a try - since I don't have access to the template, I can't use the java script option. I needed to use the post this code option, which I did. Technorati says it can't locate the code even though it is definitely in a blog post.
I'll give them a little time to see if they resolve the problem now that I've pinged once. I somehow doubt it We had this problem with another set of group blogs I've participated in - they never did manage to resolve that group blog issue.
~Denise
Claiming Blogher Blog
It took almost a week but Technorati did finally allow me to fully claim my blogher blog. It's all tagged up and I can ping it manually as soon as I post.
~Denise
I've been fighting with
I've been fighting with Technorati for weeks now. They finally automatically ping -- but they still can't pick up tags. The HELP people are nice but, well, so far not helpful.
As for Debi's other point about zero/handful referrals from BlogHer: Agreed. In part, it's because clicking "Alanna Kellogg's blog" leads to my BlogHer posts, not my blog. It'd be better is this were called "Alanna's other BlogHer contributions/posts/whatever" AND "Alanna Kellogg's blog" did, indeed, lead to my blog. It's in my profile but who goes there?
Alanna Kellogg, The Veggie Evangelist
Why it matters
I'm going show my ignorance and say this: I'm not sure why Technorati matters. For me, it's a matter of curiousity - who's linking, hey, anyone I know? Should be saying Thank You? I do use it as a blog search tool, but I also use Google blog search. I look at my Alexa stats and they're totally different than my Technorati standing. And yeah, Technorati seems out of date, but does that matter to my B, no C, no D-list blog?
Ultimately, what I want is more traffic for exposure so people will say, "Hey, you should write for US! We'll PAY you!" It's not clear to me that Technorati - or any other tracking system - will do that for me, and if they do, HOW.
Nerd's Eye View
Alexa?
I just checked this out... seems to think that my Typepad blog IS typepad.com... the site doesn't seem to work. Weird.
Link was shown within an hour
Chantal Williams was kind enough to site a parody piece I had written about the Academy Awards in her post here on Monday. My "Blogs that link here" at Technorati picked it up within an hour.
Thanks again to Chantal!
Marti