Just a Gwai Lo fun within prescribed limits [?]

When searching for people who linked to Vancouver real estate bloggers in The Tyee (which includes myself), I mistakenly put the URL in the 'blog directory', and not searching blog posts as intended. Instead of results, I was confronted with this error: “There are blogs, and then there's whatever you just typed in. If it's a blog, we don't know about it. Maybe you made a typo. Or maybe it's a blog that doesn't exist. Maybe you don't exist. (In which case, please ignore this.)” [screenshot]

I still don't like Technorati's use of re="nofollow" (especially relevant in the wake of Wikipedia using the 'rel="nofollow"' attribute on all links), but at least they have a sense of humour on their error messages.

Technorati just launched a section called "Favorites" (which we Canadians spell as "Favourites"), which lets you create a reverse-chronological list of posts from your favourite weblogs that ping the service. (Though I'm considering removing the section, my aggregator accomplishes the same thing using Drupal.) I created such a listing quickly, but as I sarcastically remarked already, I will update it just as often as I update my Kinja "mix", i.e. probably never. Only because they are both "one more thing" to maintain, not because of disatisfaction about either service.

One thing I noticed about individual Favorites pages is that in the HTML, there's a directive to allow search engines to index the site, but the same directive also says not to confer any search engine benefits (e.g. inclusion or ranking) to the links within those pages, nor with individual tag pages. Here's the directive in each page:

<meta name="robots" content="index,nofollow" />

I spoke with Kevin Marks about it, and he had some sound technical reasons for that, one of them being an increased incentive to spam Technorati (as if that incentive weren't already high enough). del.icio.us disallows indexing altogether, and therefore any possible benefit other than traffic to them or the sites linked to by its users, and the technical reasons for that a probably similar.

However sound the technical arguments are though (I have no reason to believe they aren't sound), Technorati benefits from the traffic search engine ranking of Favourites and Tags pages while those linked-to in those pages "only" get the residual traffic benefit. That is, they—the linked-to sites and individual posts—don't get any residual search engine benefits, such as faster inclusion or higher ranking. For a while I believed, without any supporting evidence, that sending a notification to services ilke pingomatic.com would increase the speed of having one's site included in a major search engine like Google. That's still potentially true, but at least with Technorati, that's not the case.

None of this should be construed as a complaint, per se, since I get out of Technorati what I expect, which is a few more hits to my weblog than if I didn't ping them. It's just that Technorati has effectively become weblog infrastructure, or at least a service on which many bloggers rely to get noticed. Just because a site has many pages that are highly ranked does not necessarily mean they should confer that high ranking onto others (see Wikipedia, for example): Technorati should and does focus on providing a fast, usable service to help generate traffic to people's weblogs and help people find what they're looking for quickly. But as a blogger it's my job to ask to have my cake and eat it too, and eating said cake means I get some "search engine juice" from a site that has a lot of it.