Technorati_sellingWow. I did not know that all these guys are talking about the same problem. Doc Searl has a list: Dave Sifry, Tom Foremski, Stephen Baker in BusinessWeek, Robert Scoble, Hans Mestrum, Jeneane Sessum, Geodog, Paul Chaney, Susan Mernit, HexLex, Padawan, Rick Segal, Stephen Pierzchala, Mike Sanders, David Weinberger, Adam Penenberg in Wired News, Jason Dowdell…
Hé that’s me showing up there as well. Ok what happened. I saw this article: Technorati and the inevitable sadness of death and David Sifry (founder of Technorati) replied on that. I wrote a comment here and also on the blog of David. An hour or so later David sent me an email about my complaint of postings not showing up, tags which were not on the system. That’s really fast! He first said that I should ping them. Hé I just have a list of 30 addresses to ping and Technorati is one of them. So this was not the problem. Ok. David sent ‘my’ problem to his dev team and later I got an email from Niall Kennedy. He said that they indexed my blog again and all should be fine. From July 6th till yesterday my blog was not indexed, he said. So great support and feedback. Kevin Marks made a comment on my posting. So far so good. But why was I on that list of Doc Searl? I dived into his postings and saw that there was another conversation going on. Not just about the problems of performance but also on money. It seems that Technorati is selling our content.
Doc wrote: The
selling of the Blogosphere—Technorati’s big push into monetizing its
treasure trove of data collected about millions of blogs, by Tom Foremski at SiliconValleyWatcher. Hmmm. And then the conversation started:
Jason Calcanis is concerned, Mike Sanders, Dave Winer, Jeremy Zawodny and Disruptive Media Technologies, quoted, Jeremy Wright quoted, Naill Kennedy (who works for Technorati) was next, Mitch Ratcliffe says, and so on and so forth. Doc made his comments (from Steve Boyd’s posting of Corante):

"[from Department of Connections]
Okay, a few questions.

First, How many witnesses reported on what Peter said on that panel?
Answer: One. Another panelist, by the way. How many bloggers jumped to conclusions based on what one guy said?

Next: Are marketers clueless or cluefull about blogging?
If the answer is "clueless," then don’t we want them to get the clues?
Especially if all the raw data is nothing more than what’s been
published on the free and open Web, and what’s sold is data about data
rather than "repurposed content"?

Next: Do we think they can get all the clues they need from search
engines and feeds of blogs and searches about blogs and other stuff
that’s already out there?
If the answer is no, then what is wrong with selling those clues to people willing to pay for them?"

(from Stowe Boyd of Corante):


"A few recommendations to Sifry and Technorati

  1. Its ok to make money, so don’t cave on the core issue.
    State, unequivocally, that you plan to make money, and have always said
    so.
  2. The raw information you are using is public, and anyone has access to it.
  3. The service that Technorati offers is important, and you will
    continue to offer many elements of that service free, as a public
    service.
  4. It is true that services — such as Google search — can have
    an enormous influence on business and society. That’s why Google’s
    share price is where it is, and why so many people work so hard at
    search engine optimization.
  5. Technorati will inevitably — to the degree that it is
    successful — influence the behavior of those who would like to benefit
    from the power thet comes from a high Technorati ranking, just like the
    lengths that people will go to in order to get a high Google ranking.
    As a result, Technorati will need to have very scrupulous business
    practices in its dealings with those to whom it sells its services."

And yesterday:
"Throwing a cat amongst the pigeons. . . the blogosphere reaction to "The Selling of the Blogosphere…." the first in a series
. . .it’s like Doc Searls snowball effect by Tom Foremski for SiliconValleyWatcher".
So it is not just all about performance, tags, links, but also about the money.

Keyquestions:
– can Technorati keep track on bloglines citations which is now more accurate?
– is it possible for Technorati to control the blogosphere?
– can or better are they allowed to make money with our free content, selling it to other companies?
– should it not be better if Yahoo or Goolge buys them for a better and stable technology?
– can we complain if a service is for free?

Let’s see how fast this posting will show up. When searching for Peter Hirschberg (Technorati staff) I see that the search is fast on the postings but the photo’s and links to Furl a.s.o. do not show up. So David what about: "Scaling, performance, and plain old bug fixing" or does it not make sense to complain because Technorati is free?