Well one interesting early result from the Meme Propagation test is that Technorati doesn’t seem to be working quite right. I have been tracking trackbacks there and I noticed two things. First of all, Technorati is not updating the number of links and sources to blogs properly — because I know the number of citations to the Meme Propagation test, and to my blog before and after the test, and the change is not reflected in Technorati’s stats. So if you are looking at the technorati results for your own blog or a posting, whatever number you are seeing is definitely *not* accurate. This in turn means that Technorati’s “Top 100” list is also not accurate. Therefore I suggest that Daypop, Blogdex and Feedster are more reliable places to get current blog statistics for your (or any) blog.
Secondly, Technorati has not indexed the GUID for the test — which is interesting — even though it *has* indexed several blogs that participate. The GUID is just a keyword like any other, so it should be findable by entering it into Technorati’s search field. I sent email to Dave Sifry about this. Let’s see what he says.
As for Google, it will take some time before Google re-indexes everyone and then we’ll see whether they do a decent job of locating the GUID. Some folks have commented on the length of the GUID. Yes, it probably ccould have been shorter but I wanted to guarantee that it would be a unique string for a long time to come. In any case, even searching on a substring of the GUID (or unique text from the original Meme post, or the URI for the post) should turn up all results for the experiment. The unique GUID is just an added protection so that the data can be found even if for some reason parties who participate don’t link back to the original post.
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Probably the GUID didn’t make it thru some kind of max-length cutoff. Something a whole lot shorter would have been sufficient as well 😉
While we don’t emphasize it, Bloglines does have a searchable link database, updated in real-time. See
http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=http%3A%2F%2Fnovaspivack.typepad.com%2Fnova_spivacks_weblog%2F2004%2F08%2Fa_sonar_ping_of.html
to see a list of blogs that have referenced your Meme Propogation entry.
Our keyword search, however, is a different system, updated more slowly, so searching on the GUID won’t show any results there yet.
Cool, thanks for the info Mark!
Hey Mark, I tried the Bloglines search but I see an error message — is your database offline?
Hmm, no, everything seems to be working ok. I just did a cut and paste with that URL, and it worked. Alternatively, you can go to http://www.bloglines.com/citations and enter the URL (partial or full, it matches both), into the text field
yep — now it’s workin!
Daypop (and most others) can’t rival Technorati. Daypop has much much less blogs covered and shows little to no current backlinks. Technorati on the other is somewhat unstable the last days, but otherwise the best. That is along with Bloglines, which I just found out a few days ago also has a backlinks checker (I still don’t know where the link to this thing is on the Bloglines homepage). I often found Bloglines showed backlinks faster than Technorati did, though I find the Technorati result list somewhat easier to read and use. The two services show about the same quantity of links.
Technorati requires that the blog ping it before it will update. This is why my links are never captured by Technorati, even though it knows my blog exists. According to Technorati, my blog hasn’t been updated for 275 days or something like that (can’t verify, it’s generating errors at the moment). This would be a surprise to my readers, who know I update at least five times a week. I have tried using the manual form-based ping, but that doesn’t work. I wrote to them a few times about it.
There is a script you can get from them to stick in your site, to claim your blog. Then you can also add yourself to their “high priority” updating list. Yeah right. Although they do a decent job of getting trackbacks for me, they still haven’t updated the stats for number of referrers in months. It’s a bit lame. I also never received the promised daily email summary. Well, they are an unfunded startup so….
Nova,
We’re working on all this stuff. Thanks for the great feedback and criticisms.
Dave
Hey Dave, nice to hear from you! Thanks for getting back to me. I am glad to hear that Technorati is on the mend.
Nova
Bloglines was pretty much broken for a while and I called and wrote to them. They appear to have fixed it pretty quickly (2 days) and it is working much better now.
I have written to Blogdex because they have a similar problem and their system is totally hosed. They have not responded and have not fixed it.
I have not written to daypop yet about their defects but will probably do that after a bit more research. That is actually the worst one I am aware of right now.