technorati

[A rare, I hope, instance of me meta-blogging...]

Something very odd is going on with technorati.

I've been a little frustrated, as over a week ago it seems they stopped indexing this page, just when I was in the middle of retrospectively adding tags to previous posts. I wrote several emails to their support, but no answer.

And I've been keeping essentially all my posts on the front page here until technorati spiders come and index it--even though that breaks my feed.

It's all been a bit of a pain. Most of all, in that, in a fervor of thinking that this tag business was in fact a good thing (partly having been convinced of their worth by Brian Lamb of Abject Learning), I'd spent quite a while adding all those tags...

(I suspect that some algorithm had determined that so many new tags in such a short time meant that my blog was a spam blog; but 10 seconds looking at it should, one might have thought, have convinced a human observer otherwise...)

In further frustration, I cc-ed the last couple of my emails to David Sifry, technorati's founder and CEO. He wrote back and said he'd look into the problem personally. Which is kind of cool, but it would be easier on him if his minions were more efficient about responding to support queries.

Now, meanwhile, for a bunch of different tags that I've been using it's showing all the posts as having updated 21 hours ago. Check out mormons, say, or, most strangely of all, last100, a tag of my own creation (referring to a class I teach) that right now shows 8 empty entries, all apparently posted exactly 21 hours ago. Though others such as martin parr still don't show up, let alone, I'm especially sad to say, posthegemony.

I have no idea what's going on.

[Update: well, that bizarreness seems to have passed. But they still ain't indexing this blog... Oh, and there's still something odd with the tag last100.]

[Update: this is very close to being a story with a happy ending... The vast majority of my tags were indexed sometime overnight. Still problems with a few, however, that I have created: arrighi, indigenism, and new left review, for instance.]

[Update: and those tags are now fixed... Normal service to be resumed.]