Technorati bug raises MSN Spaces blogs temporarily

by on April 23, 2006

I see some people are talking about Technorati's top 100 blogs list (more on this issue on Memeorandum) and the fact that several MSN Spaces blogs appeared in high spots on that list in the past few days and that some "A list" bloggers, like Dave Winer, were no longer on the list. Today at the Maker Faire I bumped into head technologist for Technorati, Tantek Celik, and founder Dave Sifry. Both said that there was a bug in the code that generated that list that should be fixed by tomorrow. The bug let the list follow blogrolls that used the "nofollow" HTML attribute, which made some blogs appear higher than they should have.

Oh, looks like the bug fix has been checked in. Dave Winer's famous blog is back on the list. 

  • Do you know of any reason why my blog still says it hasn't been updated in almost two months on Technorati? I ping them through Blog Flux Pinger and sometimes I go directly to Technorati and still nothing. Is it something with WordPress?
  • Ah, bugs are great things. Look at it positively, some sites that never would have had their moment in the sun have had a brief taste of fame.
  • anon
    This is interesting.

    Blogs on msn spaces are actually getting the same "weighting" as others. Normally, Microsoft would be happy about bugs like this and claim this is a feature of MSN spaces ala "our blogs get better positioning so don't use the competition's".

    However, since this affects Scoble's and Winer's blogs in a negative manner (ranking them lower than say, some MSN spaces blog about teenage girls in swimsuits on vacation in SoCo), this is viewed as a negative development and a "bug".

    I wonder if the outcome were different if this blog were hosted on spaces instead of wordpress?
  • Jon
    Is there any decent content on MSN spaces?

    It seems like only the worst blogs are there. MSN spaces makes Livejournal blogs look professional by comparison.
  • anon: this particular bug didn't affect me at all. It did affect Dave, but that's not why I asked Dave Sifry and Tantek about it. I saw a story about it on Memeorandum and wanted to know how they were counting links.

    Jon: my wife's blog is on MSN Spaces and it's highly regarded: http://spaces.msn.com/maryamie/
  • I must admit I find the whole "nofollow" links dilemna disappointing. Unprotected links feels like the right thing to do when committing to a conversation. Using protection is not partaking in the spirit of the interaction. Is it ?

    Not-So-Naked Conversations, then
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