technorati redux

[Apologies for another bout of meta-blogging...]

Technorati have again, it seems, given up a) on indexing this blog and b) on responding to customer support queries.

(See here for previous travails. I'm also still not the only one with this problem. Someone's even written a poem on the topic.)

Regarding the lack of customer support response, I'm prepared to give them a bit of slack given that it's been Thanksgiving weekend in the US.

But the erratic indexing itself remains something of a pain. One would like to have a little more faith in the reliability of tagging.

(Meanwhile over on Latin America on Screen, in the last week some posts have been indexed, but others not.)

The fact that the problem should reoccur just now is rather timely. It so happens that later today I'll be meeting up with Brian Lamb of Abject Learning to discuss the ways in which tags might be used as part of an experiment in blogging a class I'll be teaching next semester.

Even on a more limited scale, this semester I've been writing up some notes on readings connected to a class I've been teaching. I'd like to be able to point students to the appropriate Technorati tag so that they can access the relevant entries without having to wade through my disquisitions on Agamben or cultural studies or whatever. Their exam is coming up, so they might especially appreciate this in the next week or so.

But if we can't trust Technorati (or can't trust them to fix problems in good time), all this rather goes down the tubes. Brian himself notes the risks of relying on third-party applications. At the same time, I dislike more than almost anything else software made specifically for the educational market. (Exhibit A: the horror that is WebCT.)

Back to the issue at hand, it's not at all obvious why this happens (there's nothing on Technorati's help pages that deals with the issue), nor therefore what can be done to prevent it. And if customer response time remains so slow, then it's not as though it can be rectified unproblematically.

Though I can say that Ice Rocket is much, much worse.

Anyhow, I'll update this post as and when progress is made.

[Update: rather surprisingly quick progress... now this post and the previous one seem to have been indexed, at least partially; earlier posts such as this one remain unindexed. Even so, this is definitely a step forward.]

[Update: new posts are being indexed; other ones, still on this front page, are not.]

[Update: I've increased the number of posts on this front page, waiting until they are indexed. No sign yet...]

[Update, a week later: Though I have still not heard anything from them or their customer service via email, Technorati have now caught up on the backlog of posts to be indexed. Normal service to be resumed...]