Technorati

Have I mentioned that I don't like Technorati?

I use it, sure. I go through the hassle of pinging it every time I update the blog. Because if I didn't, its information on this would probably be on about the same level as the blogs that I link to: it thinks two of them don't exist, and thinks the other two haven't been updated in months.

It thinks that no other blogs have linked to this one, which is clearly untrue. I know of four blogs that link here, two of which Technorati knows about, and it hasn't realized that they link here. It knows that this blog links to them, but it's been so long since it checked that it thinks they're in a list of links that include "Spore." Which I'm no longer all that interested in.

Oh, and it uses Alexa to track web traffic. Alexa is useless, because it's only sampling people who have downloaded their tool bar, a self-selected group. Not random, not scientific. I can't even get what limited use this technique provides, because this blog isn't in the "top 100,000." I get my data from Statcounter, and occasionally Google Analytics when I remember about it, neither of those are useful for Technorati because they require putting a bit of code into the website.

On the other hand . . . Technorati gives me hits. Not a whole lot of hits, but having the site in the listings has steered a few visitors this way. Mostly from the Oblivion tags. Mind you, the traffic here is overwhelmingly from the handful of people who I know and who read it regularly, not random walk-ons. Still, the idea that random people have read my witless ranting amuses me.