Ok, call us stupid, say it, Techwag, your stupid, but really folks, the whole hoopla over technorati only going back six months is really not news, lots of folks knew this, and have learned to deal with the idea. They have been doing this for quite a while now, but given all the press, showing up on Techmeme you would have thought that technorati suddenly grew a few extra body parts overnight.
Technorati has been doing the six month cut off for at least the last year best we can reckon, and this is not surprising, we just figure that this was the way that the system worked, and that is ok. If technorati wanted to hold things only for 6 months, wow, we don’t get the never ending curve of “authority” and things are kept fresher, if you want long term anything then well, yes, google blog search will do quite nicely.
The surprise comes in then that technorati in an interview with Techcrunch says, “This is not a planned issue, but one due to money”. Well so much for the great theory that we had come up in our own minds, one that we had accepted quite nicely. This is where the stupid part comes in, since we had already worked out a strategy on why holding 6 months worth of data, we didn’t worry about it until Techcrunch, Kevin Burton and Zoli’s blog all opined, dug deeper, then suddenly our “truth” was revealed as an economizing procedure, not as built.
Needless to say we might have dug a bit deeper into the concept rather than making up an excuse that worked for the observed facts.
The more interesting question is that as you look around your company, how many other “economizing” factors have taken place that keeps data away from the workers because the pennies per gigabyte is too expensive for the company, or the systems that they have will not scale right, let alone bad decisions on what to purchase and how to use it.
Needless to say, decision makers in companies should be looking at the quiet rebellion over technorati, and understand that people will make assumptions (IE This is how the System Works) rather than see if there is anything more to it. Then someone will come along and point out the idea that the system really should store more data, and oh hey by the way, here it is.
