Technorati Top Favorited Buzz

Lately, we have seen lots of movement in the Technorati Popular Blogs list. Notably, the anchor of the red hot Technorati Favorited trains, "Dosh Dosh" has jumped to the #8 spot in the most favorited blog list.

It all started with Dosh Dosh's favorite exchange experiment, where bloggers exchange links and technorati favorites with each others' blogs. This quickly became a big hit and helps lots of unknown blogs getting some attentions.

This doesn't take too long before the big boys like the Mashable and Problogger caught up the gaming. Darren blogged about this issue and received lots of nasty comments from other bloggers. This quickly becomes one of the hottest topic in the blogosphere.

It would be interesting to see if Technorati is going to do anything about it. My guess is that they won't. The Most Linked Blog list already served the purpose of representing the "TOP" blogs, why would they need an extra one that was 90% similar?

After all, some blogs really benefited from the favorite exchange and some gained nothing but a few "favorite" in technorati. You just have to decide what you want to do and have fun doing it.

Habitaquo - What is it?

For the last two days, the word "habitaquo" topped the search chart in Technorati. It looks like a Spanish word for me, so I look it up in Google Translate and found out that it doesn't have any meaning. Why does this word has large number of searches and blog posts then? Technorati's WTF on habitaquo,

google.dirson.com launched a SEO contest in which the winner will be the website appearing on the first position of Google SERPs on May 23rd with "habitaquo" word. The first prize is an Apple MacBook Core 2 Duo so there are lots of blogs inserting this new word.

Google search result page has different rankings on the same keyword in different countries/cities. Users in NY, Seattle or Toronto may see different results on SERP even if they type in the same word because they are using different data centers. Hence, google.dirson.com also specify the IP of the data center "64.233.167.100". You would be able to find out more information on Google datacenter here.

Technorati April Fool's Logo

Technorati is showing us their creativeness by getting a series of new Logo out on April Fools. You can see the logos by going to their home page and keep refreshing it.

They have rewritten the letters in TECHNORATI and created some other phrases, like "heartTonic", "hotice ranT", "ho cant riTe", "ricoTta hen", "Threaticon", "China oTter" ...

Of course, we would also be seeing Google's April Fools logo and many internet companies play around with their web pages on April Fools.

Things We Don't know about Technorati

Technorati, one of the most heavily used data in the blogosphere. Bloggers usually use Technorati to measure how many links point to their blogs. I am not sure how many of us lose sleep on seeing the number not increasing. We understand that there is no way we can get it perfect but do we know how accurate they are?

David Dalka from Chicago points out that Consumerist.com cannot be found in Technorati, arguably one of the most popular and heavily weighted blog directory. They have written to Technorati and,

They’ve in fact added his blog - but Technorati has some programming glitch that keeps dropping his blog out of their index shortly thereafter no matter how many times they add it back. Based on that brief glimpse that Ben and I saw, The Consumerist was on the verge of becoming a Technorati 100 blog.

If Technorati cannot get one of the most popular blog to work, do we know how many millions small blogs are getting correct results shown? The short answer is No. People have found that there are many links that didn't reported by Technorati and many times they manually pinging the links to them.

Technorati is still the best of its kind out there but it is far from perfect. Seth Godin doesn't check his rank, but maybe he will start doing so when it is fixed and show that it is meaningful to him.