TechWag

Looks like the sploggers are winning over at technocrati this morning, and over the last few months. Lots of material that is one line blog entries, pornographic, single entry blogs that use the key words we search on, or are only meant to build out affiliation clicks to some of the other smaller social networking sites. While we love Technorati, and we use it a lot, in many ways we are starting to wonder about the relevance of systems like Technorati, Tailrank, and others because of the inundation of splogs, and data that just does not make sense.

Techcrunch pointed out that in July Tailrank was featuring where to buy Viagra on line, as the sole entry, earlier we had pointed out that Tailrank was DOA by using a lot of screen caps. Moreover, while we talked to Kevin Burton about it, (thanks for the interview, sorry about the Valleywag reaction) it seems that many of the blog aggregators, search engines, and the rest are having a harder time telling splogs from the good stuff.

That means folks that are really writing good things are being buried in a truck load of stuff, that is meant to do nothing more than make money, or divert people to other sites as an affiliation click.

People will reject a system that delivers things they are not looking for, and while Tailrank struggles, Technorati is quickly becoming the next big lot of stuff, that makes no sense nor is relevant to anything other than splogs.

Going through the hot key top lists, the list has barely moved in a week. Noelia and Ron Paul have been in the top two positions. In addition, while Noelia is a popular singer, and Ron Paul is someone’s last best hope for political redemption, going through their links on Technorati is a disaster of people tagging the words Noelia and Ron Paul, but talking about moving furniture, getting drunk, hawking porn, or selling on line meds that will totally mess you up.

While we would love to see a better way of matching tags against the actual content, maybe these search engines can take a look at the tag, take a look at the content, and if they do not match, alter the tags to match up with the content being provided. Of course that does not mean that someone will not drop the top 10 Technorati tags into their file as a way to beat the system. Realistically though, many of the blog aggregators while useful, need to work on the next system that is more about removing splogs.

Although what would be interesting to see is something akin to page rank, while Google waits weeks if not months to determine the quality of a blog or web site with their page rank system, and since splogs come and go with stunning regularity, maybe something like page rank would fit the bill. Google Blog search consistently returns valid results, other blog aggregators and search systems might want to see what Google is doing, and then see if they can do one better.

Tags: education, idea, Participation, Politics //