Technorati Hates Me

Every day, five or six thousand social-networking, blogosphere-trotting, long-tailing web sites are created.  All of them with a really great, new idea that combines RSS with AJAX and plans to stay in Beta forever.  Out of all of those, a few are really cool and useful - and Technorati is definitely one of them. Does Technorati like me?Technorati tracks blogs and the discussions, reactions, and responses that bounce from blog to blog via the simple mechanism of who is linking to who.  It also collects tags and allows you to search the mass of blogs for posts that might be relevant to your query.  Bloggers can "claim" their own blog and use some surprisingly fun tools to see who is talking about them.  Some people have even been abandoning the whole trackback system in favor of Technorati. And apparently, Technorati hates me. Now, Technorati hasn't outright said it hated me (or us, since this is a group blog), but it won't let us claim Unsought Input.  Every time we try to make the claim, we get this:
There was a problem claiming your blog. Please try again in a few minutes. You can also go to Technorati Help for help claiming your blog.
Trying again is of no use, whether we wait a few minutes or a few weeks.  Using the customer service form to send an email has been fruitless as well.  Each time an acknowledgment email is promptly returned, but no answer--even when we send them a reminder with our ticket number. For a while I thought I knew the problem - some of our authors had claimed their author archive pages as their own blogs.  This doesn't really work, though, since virtually no one links to our author pages and posts on Unsought Input don't fall under the same URL pattern.  After we cleared out those old claims, I had a small glimmer of hope - but alas, we still cannot complete the claim. I know they are busy.  I know that it is a free service (though to tell the truth I would be willing to pay a reasonable price, like I have with StumbleUpon and Last.fm, it really is a cool service).  But at this point I feel like a freshman in high school with no date for the winter formal: Technorati does not like me But why doesn't Technorati like us?  There was a post about some technical difficulties on the Technorati blog last month, but judging by the example at blogs.marketwatch.com, it turned out to be more about indexing times than problems with claims. I've seen the same issue mentioned on other blogs like Bark Bark Woof Woof, and a few commenters have mentioned the possibility that Unsought Input has been identified as spam.  I hope the latter is the case, because it has become clear recently that if a powerful gateway site like Google thinks you are spam, you are in big trouble. ... To be fair, this post is a bit tongue-in-cheek.   The folks at Technorati are remarkably accessible, and many of them have blogs of their own (or even make their email addresses available to the public).  I just haven't worked up the gumption to pester them more directly.  I would much rather go through the support page, I know they are busy.

Post a Comment

(or leave a trackback to your blog)