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Saturday, April 21st, 2007

Good, clean fun with Technorati Favorites

Add to Technorati FavoritesMaki over at the wonderful blog Dosh Dosh has been running an experiment that has to do with the Technorati bookmarking system.

In a nutshell, Technorati tracks popular blogs in two ways: “Most linked to”, and “Most favorited”. While it can be extremely difficult to rank in the “Most linked to” list, the “Most favorited list” is a lot easier. Right now, you only need about 130 people to add you to their Technorati favorites to make it into the top 100.

Sounds intriguing, eh?

#13 and climbing..

In fact, Dosh Dosh has already broken into the top 100 and still rocketing up the charts – just now passing up Guy Kawaski to land at number 13:

I encourage you to head on over there and see how the experiment is set up. It is essentially an offer to exchange favorites, but the twist is that Dosh Dosh is also encouraging bloggers to run similar exchanges and then hosting the full directory of them right there on the original blog post. The end result is essentially a giant orgy of Technorati favorites.

Wow! Look at the possibilities…

The things I like about this, with the exception of the ingenious automated workaround Andy Beard came up with, this is a wonderful opportunity for bloggers to socialize with other bloggers that they may never have met otherwise and to take a look at their blogs. In my opinion, this is what social media is all about.

But on the other hand…

Dosh Dosh isn’t breaking any policies at Technorati, that I am aware of. I firmly believe that all social media sites should be extremely clear about what behavior is acceptable and what is unacceptable. As Technorati hasn’t warned against this kind of thing to the best of my knowledge, I don’t think there is a real problem with it as far as they are concerned.

My only problem with the Dosh Dosh approach is it is relatively indiscriminate and, in some ways, a little short sighted because I think it undermines the intent of Technorati’s favorite feature.

On this subject Maki writes:

Rankings of any sort have always consisted of malleable elements which can be manipulated and the Technorati 100 is no exception. All blogs are free to hold similar contests or schemes to increase their rankings if they so wish and this is pretty much an open playing field.

Now, I’m not exactly the guardian of Technorati, but this strikes me as a problem. What Dosh Dosh describes as possible is exactly what’s going to happen as word leaks out. This will be replicated and blogs will have to hold similar indiscriminate exchanges in order to compete for those rankings. I’m not sure if that is entirely bad, or that Technorati thinks it’s bad, but I do know it is going to make SMO look even worse than some think it is and I’m not happy about that part.

I think a fundamental tenet of white-hat SMO is to participate in social media sites in a way that builds them up and improves them.

Now, here is a Technorati Exchange I can get behind 100%:

A Technorati Exchange (with a small catch)

I am always interested to meet other bloggers and see their blogs. The only catch is that I don’t like reading crappy blogs and won’t add them to my bookmarks.

I would like to exchange Technorati favorites with blogs that aren’t crappy, spammy or sploggy. If you have an interesting blog I will add you to my favorites and I will publish a link to your blog here.

Here is how my Technorati Exchange works in detail:

  1. Please don’t do a thing if you don’t like my blog. If you can’t honestly favorite it, please don’t.
  2. If you do like it, please add it to your Technorati favorites by clicking this link and let me know your Technorati username in the comments and note your blog in the website field.
  3. I will explore your blog, and if I find it interesting and think others might like it I will do two things.

    First, I will add you to my Technorati favorites. My handle is mblair007. If I really like your blog a lot I might even add you to my RSS reader, or I might drop in from time to time.

    Second, I will list on the bottom of this post with a brief capsule review and encourage other people to check out your blog and get to know you.

So, in a nutshell this is kind of like a blogger bookmarking party. Let’s get to know each other, get bookmarked and have some good, clean fun.

Please don’t enter if you think your blog is a little crappy. That’s like coming to the party after not showering for a couple weeks. Your time would be better spent cleaning up your blog.

If you do think your blog is crappy (unless you are a spammer or a splogger), I’d like to hear from you in my contact form over at my blog on website optimization and I might (no promises) be able to give you some tips over there on how to improve it. Or, you might just be being too hard on your blog and it might be pretty good after all 🙂

UPDATE: Please make sure you read Maki’s comments below. Maki makes a couple of compelling points in regards to the positive impacts of the experiment and also pointed to a great take on all of this over at Engtech. Engtech’s has illustrated that this whole experiment is helping to breath life into Technorati’s favorites system which has not been widely used.

Also, if you are interested in what can be done with OPML as a means of aggregating and maintaining a social network, please check out Andy Beard’s post that I alluded to above. His excellent post really deserves more attention than a drive by link. Andy is all about building readership through adding value and I didn’t intend to imply otherwise. His RSS feed is cemented in my reader.

UPDATE II: As I mentioned to Andy on his blog, after exploring Technorati Favorites deeper, I’ve gone over to the dark side in a sense. The reason for this is that I’ve been using del.icio.us as the repository for my archive of website bookmarks. This includes the list of websites that are used in the SMOsearch Google CSE.

Del.icio.us is a little bit of a pain to work with in that there isn’t a particularly easy way to grab your OPML file from it. Andy’s post prompted me to investigate Technorati’s OPML capabilities and I am impressed. You can easily grab an OPML file off of any user’s bookmark tags. Also, unlike del.icio.us, it only bookmarks sites and so you get a clean OPML file of sites, as opposed to a mixed file with sites and pages. Over the course of the next week I’ll be converting SMOsearch to use Technorati favorites.

I’ll also make a Technorati favorites search off of my SMO index available from the SMOsearch page as each search has it’s advantages.

In order to experiment with Technorati’s Favorites and their favorites search when pushed to the max with a diverse mix of feeds, I’ve imported my OPML, Andy’s OPML, Maki’s OPML, Robert Scoble’s OPML, and Garry Conn’s OPML.

I’m staring at a massive page of favorites in Technorati — 1882 favorites to be exact. My Favorites page is 6MB large and takes a while to load and render, even on DSL. Ouch!

And so in about two or three minutes of uploading OPML files, I’ve become perhaps the most indiscriminate bookmarker around…

I’m going to be visiting the sites that I scooped up over the course of the next couple weeks, tossing those that deserve to be tossed and tagging the keepers.

Now that I have bored you to tears with talk of OPML…

IN CLOSING: My Technorati Exchange continues per the rules above, and nothing has changed in that regard except I very well may have favorited you already 🙂

UPDATE III (3 May 2007): I’m not going to allow comments here that pull the old “redirect through Alexa trick” to game Alexa rankings. Also, I wanted to say that this coming weekend I am going to close up this exchange and post my capsule reviews of the Blogs I’ve found here and favorited.

Comments

  1. Maki :: Dosh Dosh wrote:

    Hi Mark!

    Thanks for commenting on the exchange and setting up your own version of it.

    There’s been a lot of interesting comments on the experiment up to now and I don’t think the Technorati favorites feature has never gotten so much publicity until now.

    Engtech (www.engtech.wordpress.com) has written about how the Favorites feature was a way for Technorati to attract lots of links from bloggers, while prominently branding itself across thousands of blogs. The experiment is actually to their benefit because the favorites feature is severely underused.. for example, you only need 130 to get in the Top 100 while there are over 70 million blogs in the world?

    In truth, a fair amount of blogs in the previous Top 100 (before the experiment began) got there purely through contests or similar fave exchanges. This has been going on for a while, and they were the ones that were lucky or smart enough to get in early.

    I actually think the experiment does help Technorati because it has directed attention towards their ranking system and its potential for individual bloggers. I think the main reason why they haven’t spoken out is because more active usage of their social media features benefits them. And also because the faves feature is basically harmless. It doesn’t affect linkcount rankings or damage any site in the long or short run..

    My actual report on the amount of traffic generated will be up next week and I’m sure it’ll be rather interesting to see what happens after I publish it.

    Will link you up in a while within my original post. Think it will be good for the bloggers from my blog to read about your thoughts as well. 🙂

    Posted 21 Apr 2007 at 6:25 am

  2. Andy Beard wrote:

    Mark ultimately my aim is to get more traffic for the people taking part than the one off visits to exchange a favorite.

    Most of the things I undertake as projects I do for the “long haul” and Technorati favorites I have been talking about just as long, in fact longer than MyBlogLog or Dofollow.

    I am looking forward to the added benefit of using Blogrovr, Megite and Technorati’s own features such as being able to search your favorites with the benefit of a large and varied OPML, and for sites I just can’t cope with in a feed reader.

    I am just doing something with Technorati that I really wanted to do with MyBlogLog.

    Posted 21 Apr 2007 at 7:32 am

  3. Dawud Miracle wrote:

    I’ve added you to my faves.

    Here’s my faves link

    Posted 21 Apr 2007 at 8:05 am

  4. Dawud Miracle wrote:

    Mark, one positive from this little experiment is that I found you blog (added it my faves – as I said above) and then poked around a bit. I liked your content enough that I grabbed your feed.

    I’m always apprehensive about theme ‘experiments’ as well. And I echo what Andy said; I’m interested in traffic and readership. The few of these I do are always with an eye toward finding readers that enjoy my content. And I do see an increase in traffic and readership. Time will only tell only effective it is.

    Either way, as I mentioned, I found your blog, grabbed your feed and now you may have another reader from participating.

    Posted 21 Apr 2007 at 8:15 am

  5. mblair wrote:

    @Maki – Thank you very much for dropping by to add your thoughts. You bring up some compelling points that I am going to address in my original post as an update. This is no doubt a huge promotion for Technorati’s favorites system, and by helping to build that up you are being highly supportive of their social media efforts.

    Although I only spent a couple sentences on the positive aspects, I want to clarify here that I think there is a huge upside to your experiment as it has so many wonderful social benefits. I am 95% in favor of it.

    Furthermore, I think your experiment helps to increase the exposure of new blogs which have an uphill battle breaking into the conversation in social circles due to the mutually-reinforcing link patterns that can naturally develop amongst the most popular bloggers.

    I also think that your whole experiment serves as a great point of discussion as to the etiquette involved in marketing to social media sites. Kudos!

    @Andy – I should have spent more than a drive-by link on your excellent post. Your project is fascinating. I’ve been experimenting a lot with OPML too for use in my SMOsearch tool, which is using a Google CSE. I’m actually going to tinker with some of the techniques in your post later on this weekend. 🙂

    @Dawud – Great blog you have! I’m happy to have found it and have added it to my favorites, and I’m happy to have you over here. I agree 100% that Maki’s experiment is mostly positive in that it gets bloggers out of their usual circles and meeting other bloggers. As I mentioned in the original post, meeting new people is ultimately what social media is all about.

    Posted 21 Apr 2007 at 4:20 pm

  6. Andy Beard wrote:

    You might also find this like interesting.

    I have actually been quite outspoken about people building up huge favorites lists in MBL for no purpose other than the possible promotion, especially when friending them sent emails.

    With Technorati you can actually achieve part of what I discussed in this post for MBL

    http://andybeard.eu/2007/03/mybloglog-api-how-far-forward-are-you-thinking.html

    Maybe you are one of those forward thinker who can benefit from it, and create something useful.

    Posted 21 Apr 2007 at 4:40 pm

  7. mblair wrote:

    Andy, thanks for the link! I’m very interested in the mashup possibilities and am really interested in MBL because I think it does a great job of creating a sense of community. I’m going to be playing around with Digg’s newly released API soon too. I haven’t looked at that at all yet to see what they’ve made available.

    Posted 21 Apr 2007 at 5:00 pm

  8. Ponn Sabra wrote:

    I really like what you got here Mark!

    So, I faved you & linked-ya!

    Here’s my info:
    username: ponnsabra
    Fave me here.

    Link back post here.

    Peace, Ponn

    Posted 21 Apr 2007 at 9:16 pm

  9. santaram wrote:

    Hi Mark thanks for adding my blog into technorati favorties and please feel free in visiting my blog

    http://santa-reviews.blogspot.com

    Posted 21 Apr 2007 at 9:40 pm

  10. Deepak Jeswal wrote:

    Hi, I have added you on my fav list:)

    My blog url – http://www.deepakjeswal.com

    and username on technorati – deepakjeswal.com

    Posted 21 Apr 2007 at 10:59 pm

  11. mblair wrote:

    @Ponn,
    @Deepak – Both of you are favorited. Thanks for stopping by!

    @santaram – Thanks for the invite! I got your bookmark in the batch I imported (see updates above). Thanks for the invite — just checked it out. 🙂

    Posted 22 Apr 2007 at 4:58 am

  12. Andy Beard wrote:

    Would you believe the first Google Toolbar button I created was for Technorati, but I never published it.
    Whilst the RSS was nice, I think at the time they didn’t have a way to search just your favorites, or I didn’t find that feature.

    There were also at that time a few other Technorati favorites buttons with different features for search, and one which was localised so it would work with either the English of Japanese search.

    I actually created that button before MyBlogLog was on my horizon, when I first started exchanging Technorati favorites.

    To add a feed, all you need is

    http://feeds.technorati.com/faves/{option1}?format=rss

    Surrounded it with code and pre tags, maybe it will show up.

    Commenting here, because comments seem to be closed on the button thread.

    Posted 22 Apr 2007 at 5:32 am

  13. Andy Beard wrote:

    Ah well, the formatting failed

    Posted 22 Apr 2007 at 5:34 am

  14. mblair wrote:

    Andy — thanks for the snippet! I’ll add that into the toolbar button later today, and am going to update that post to note this.

    My apologies for not being able to comment on the other thread — I had commenting open but was doing some minor work in the commenting code that accidentally borked it for uncommented posts.

    I’ve also cleaned up the formatting just a touch in your comment and will look to find ways to make code easier to add to comments in the future.

    Posted 22 Apr 2007 at 12:09 pm

  15. Andy Beard wrote:

    I use this plugin for formatting
    http://blog.igeek.info/wp-plugins/igsyntax-hiliter/

    I don’t know why, but when I upgraded to 2.1 I hit a problem with curly quotes, or maybe I had that problem before and didn’t realise it.

    Curly quotes are useless for anything anyway, so the fix is this little plugin from Denis
    http://www.semiologic.com/software/unfancy-quote/

    Some of the plugins Denis writes are very simple, and in fact the most simple ones are the ones that stand the test of time.

    Posted 22 Apr 2007 at 1:11 pm

  16. Deborah wrote:

    Hi there,

    I’ve added you to my favs.

    I’ve added a link to your blog, as I see you’re a participant in the Do Follow movement. I’ve been adding links to sites to reward some linky love for those using it, and to instill incentive in others to follow suit.

    Here is the link to the post:
    http://www.fastlanetransport.ca/blog/i-will-follow-do-follow/blogs-websites

    My Technorati username is fastfastlane, and link to
    add me to your Technorati Favorites here.

    Hope to see you stop by some time. Our blog is the furthest thing from spammy…I don’t do any kind of sales or Adsense. My hope is to create readers that would enjoy finding something interesting or funny to brighten their day.

    My participation in the Tech train was to try to gain some exposure to reach out to meet new people that might enjoy our site.

    “That’s like coming to the party after not showering for a couple weeks.”…too funny, but true!

    Cheers!

    Posted 23 Apr 2007 at 4:02 pm

  17. Alan wrote:

    You have been favorited 🙂

    http://technorati.com/faves?add=http://hackedgadgets.com

    Posted 23 Apr 2007 at 4:27 pm

  18. Greg wrote:

    hi, i added your blog to my favorite on technorati
    username – pasat
    http://technorati.com/faves?sub=addfavbtn&add=http://www.hottnez.com/myspace

    Posted 23 Apr 2007 at 6:54 pm

  19. iszo wrote:

    Hello There,

    I have faved you in my technorati.

    MY ID : iszo
    MY URL : http://blog.fyais.com
    FAVOURITE MY BLOG : http://technorati.com/faves/?add=http://blog.fyais.com

    I’m also offering Technorati favourites exchange and interested to become part of it. Could you put my link to your list?
    I will do the same too.

    MY LINKS :
    http://blog.fyais.com/2007/04/19/technorati-favourites-exchange/

    Thanks in advance!

    Posted 24 Apr 2007 at 7:58 pm

  20. Jay Ess wrote:

    Hi,

    I added your blog to my faves. Here is my fave link: http://technorati.com/faves?sub=addfavbtn&add=http://www.tightbrain.com

    I will add you to my feed as well. Great content.

    Posted 28 Apr 2007 at 7:34 am

  21. hh wrote:

    hi there,

    i have favourited and linked you. Awaiting yours 🙂

    My technorati address is here.

    Also wrote a post on this. The url is here. So whoever favourites me or link to me, and leave a site name on my blog will get a favourite/ linkback from me too.

    Posted 29 Apr 2007 at 6:20 am

  22. Greg Lunger wrote:

    Hello my friend, I just finished Faving your Blog.

    This my ID – ironmanxart

    http://technorati.com/faves?add=http://greglunger.com/

    I have a Technorati Favorites Exchange going on at my site too !
    I Have the “Share the Power of Technorati Favs” setup too, by Mr. Gary Lee !
    I have put you on my list there too !

    http://greglunger.com/?p=68

    This is a Great Experiment, it’z Working !!!******

    Thank you my Friend !!!******

    Posted 09 May 2007 at 7:11 pm

  23. Hobo SEO wrote:

    We’re having a bit of Technorati fun at our site too.

    Posted 13 May 2007 at 10:28 am

  24. Hobo SEO wrote:

    PS – I’ve faved you!

    Posted 13 May 2007 at 10:29 am

  25. marriedmelody wrote:

    Hello! I just added your blog to my favorites. My Technorati user name is marriedmelody. You can favorite me by clicking here. I also started Technorati Favorites and Link Exchange and linked to your post from my blog:
    http://making-money-through-internet.blogspot.com/2007/05/blog-advice-technorati-favorites-and.html. Please feel free to add me to your list of Technorati Link Exchange participants.

    Posted 22 May 2007 at 3:51 am

  26. Andreo wrote:

    Hi.
    I’ve just added you to my Faves.

    My Technorati username:
    askripko

    My blog:
    http://iphone-forum.blogspot.com

    Add to Technorati Favorites

    Thanks…

    Posted 06 Jun 2007 at 12:06 pm

  27. Alex Vorn wrote:

    Just added you like favorite, add me too:
    http://technorati.com/faves/?add=http://techgadgetblog.blogspot.com
    My blog name: Tech Gadget Blog
    My Blog Url: http://techgadgetblog.blogspot.com/
    The best!

    Posted 30 Jul 2007 at 1:17 am

  28. Brandon wrote:

    Thanks! You are officially favorited. Here’s a link to the Technorati Favorite for Design Crack and a link to my Technorati Favorite Exchange Post.

    Posted 08 Sep 2007 at 10:38 am

  29. simpro wrote:

    hi
    i added your blog to my technorati favourites
    my technorati username is simpro

    plz fave my blog: http://technorati.com/faves/?add=http%3A%2F%2Filovemyheart.blogspot.com

    Posted 15 Nov 2007 at 2:04 am