You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours! No Thanks!
I read every post Andy Beard writes. I don’t care if a particular post has a mundane title, he’s put out so much quality stuff that he always warrants me spending more time reading his posts in Google Reader than I allot for 90% of the blog I read.
As you guys know I recently called out Googlr for asking me to join his MyBlogLog community and promising me he’d join mine in return.
Googlr (good blog check it out) and I discussed the resolved the matter because he wasn’t aware that those kind of solicitations are considered by many to be spam.
More importantly they lower the value of your community as you have people joining simply for the sake of joining. Many of these people may not like your blog, but will join anyway simply to have another member in their community.
Now, back to Andy and on to Technorati.
I added Andy’s blog as a favorite on Technorati before he wrote a post entitled “Goal Setting & Technorati 100“.
If I doubled the number of people who joined my Technorati Favorites, I would currently be ranked 37 – a very achievable target.
If every one of my subscribers added me to their favorites, I would actually be in the Top10
Okay, that’s good.. You’ve got my vote already Andy.
But, what is this I find on your sidebar?
Are you saying that you’ll add ANY blogger that adds you to their favorites to your own Technorati favorites?
I have a reciprocal policy, thus if you add me to your Technorati Favorites, your content will appear here
I’m sorry Andy but I think that is plain wrong. What you’re saying is “You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours!”.
You’re setting a playing field where everybody can be on your favorite list regardless of quality. If they’re crap and don’t deserve a vote, so what?
You’ll get your vote, they’ll get there’s and to hell with the fact that this is little more than gaming Technorati.
To hell with the fact that it reduces the value of the favorites system! If everybody favorites everybody simply for a reciprocal favorite, then the system has no value and no point.
Andy, I don’t know if this is an oversight on your part? I sure hope it is, as it’s not something I would expect from you!
I don’t want somebodies vote unless I have earned it! Therefore I will not vote for somebody unless they’ve earned it, regardless of whether or not they’ve voted for me.
I have 4, count them 4 people who have added this blog as a favorite on Technorati. I have also favorited exactly 4 other blogs (for now expect that to change later today as I start to use the favorites service properly).
All of the people I have favorited have reciprocated (including Andy). I hope it wasn’t out of some sense of obligation.
If any of you who have added me to your favorites list did so, solely because I favorited you, then I would request that you remove me from your favorites list!
If I didn’t earn it, I don’t want it!
Hi Paul
For months I had the reciprocation policy taking up a large amount of space between the post content and the comments, and a few readers mentioned in various places that there was just too much clutter.
My blog was always intended to be a community experiment.
I also think a blogger should stay in touch with his readership, not matter how large a subscription base grows.
Many people use Technorati as their only feed reader, in a casual kind of ways. Technorati favorites as far as I can see isn’t used in the Authority calculations by Technorati, but the subscription counts might be accessed by Google in some way for their Blogsearch ranking, and Blog search engine ranking is one of my core topics.
The syndication on the sidebar is an act of giving rather than receiving. I don’t use a blogroll, and people for years have been exchanging blogroll links.
I have however noticed some repeat visits based upon displaying that content excerpt.
For years people have been displaying RSS feeds on websites to keep them fresh, though if I was experimenting with that I would have the feeds on every page.
I don’t share content with Google Reader – my own content is free to use for that purpose because that is how I license it, but I wouldn’t take the risk with someone elses.
I don’t reciprocate Technorati Favorites with splogs, and I do try to be selective so I will add a personal blog or one in a related niche, and many people have multiple blogs.
I think there is a subtle difference between what I am doing and the case you highlighted in MyBlogLog. Most of those solicitations come from people who have no interest in you, and have never visited your blog.
I have also written in the past about other benefits, such as Technorati possibly indexing sites that have favorites more quickly. One day I hope Technorati do away with blogroll links that directly affect their “Authority” calculations.
Hey Andy,
I didn’t notice the reciprocation policy before today, but I don’t think that matters.
I agree with you about MyBlogLog, but my point there was not about the contact, but how it lowers the value of the service by damaging the community.
However, I still don’t agree with reciprocating links/favorites to blogs in which you have no interest. You said you don’t reciprocate with splogs. That’s good!
But I still think it’s bad, to reciprocate, and put a blog on your favorites list, if you have no interest in it.
Marking other blogs as your favorite simply because they marked you as a favorite lowers the value of the service, whether it’s used to determine authority or not.
You marking somebody as a favorite holds no value or meaning if you simply reciprocate with everyone who marks you as favorite.
It doesn’t matter if they’re a reader of your blog or not.
Also, the syndication in your sidebar is no NO WAY the same as exchanging a blog roll link. Typically blog rolls actually contain blogs which the author reads and therefore recommends.
Yes, some link trading does occur, but then it’s a more considered choice than simply reciprocating because somebody linked to you.
Do you read and recommend all the blogs that you have marked as a favorite due to your policy?
Let me stress that I’m not attacking you Andy! I just think that this kind of reciprocation lowers the value of the favorites as a service, and syndicating those blogs content in your sidebar lowers the value of your site, as you neither recommend those blogs, are affiliated with those blogs, read those blogs, or are part of a blog network with them.
You have a great blog. I just think that at this moment, a Technorati favorite from Andy Beard means nothing. It no longer serves it’s intended purpose of being a recommendation because you favorite everyone (excluding splogs) who favorites you!
Oh, this just sprang to mind. You said:
That statement implies (splogs already excluded) that you don’t reciprocate with every body that favorites. It implies that you are selective about which blogs you reciprocte with based on their genre (tech/personal etc…)
Which is it? Do you have a reciprocation policy or not? If you’re selective (beyond splogs) as you said above, then the policy on your site is wrong.
As I said before, you have a great blog Andy, and I’m a fan of it. I’d hate to see it take a turn for the worst. It’s been on the up and up since I started reading and I’d like to see it continue that way. I’m sure you do to…
Paul
Paul you have written in the past that you don’t use Technorati. I do use Technorati daily, and every time I visit the home page I am greeted with a page full of what my readers are writing about.
Every time I am on my own primary blog, I see a little of what my readers are writing about, and in many ways I prefer that than widgets like “The Good Blogs”.
It is possible I need to revert to some of the more long winded explanation about how I reciprocate, maybe on a separate page.
If and when MyBlogLog have an API available, I might well go through every person who has joined my community and join theirs, because then I could use that to create a meme tracker to get an overview of what my readers are talking about. The current “what is hot in your community” type functions aren’t useful.
I would much rather use a memetracker that relates to my readers than a memetracker that relates to the blogs that Techmeme have selected.
Who knows, that might also be a direction Technorati will explore as well.
Technorati is all about providing an overview of what is happening around a certain subject, and using it to provide an overview of the interests of my community is useful to me specifically.
RSS subscriptions are nice, but they don’t tell you anything about the kind of people who are subscribing, and it is hard to find out what kind of content would be most appropriate for them.
My Technorati favorites has an effect on what I write, and that is increasing daily.
Blogrolls and how they are treated really do undermine the authority calculations, and there are blogroll groups that go beyond friends and blog networks, adding hundreds of blogroll links. Paula mentioned one in the comments.
Some of the people who I add to my favorites have 10 or more blogs. Often it goes beyond reciprocation, and I end up add 2 or 3 of thier sites.
Andy, you must have gone back quite a bit to find me saying I don’t use Technorati, because I have been using it for quite a while now.
You said :
Have you tried using Google Reader or and feed reader with a River of News view?
But:
What? Subscribing to peoples feeds tells you less about what they like than the technorati page with it’s headline coverage?
Andy, why not just subscribe to your readers feeds (those that add you as a favorite) and set up the river of news view. If you don’t want full feeds, set it to title only, so it’s just like technorati. You can always reciprocate the favorite if they genuinely deserve it.
Now, you have an overview of what your readers are writing about and can see who they’re linking out to if you choose to use truncated or full feed view.
So, now you have access to the same information, without lowering the value of giving someone a favorite!
Just a thought….
I should have checked back to what you actually stated, rather than what I remembered.
MyBlogLog has maybe 100,000 users, and I believe Technorati has quite a few more.
I do use Google Reader, and my Technorati Favorites are subscribed to in it.
People adding me to their favorites is a way to signal “Hey I am here”, and as soon as I reciprocate, they end up in my feed reader, but ultimately the ones that are specific to niches I am interested in end up as subscriptions to the full feed.
Ultimately I want tools that allow me to track memes among my readers based on links and keywords, and I am sure that will happen.
While I dislike how this, in my view, diminishes the value of the favorite service, I must admit that your solution works to achieve what you need in the absence of a meme tracker specifically for your readers!
I wonder how long it will take somebody to create a proper service build around the concept of personal meme trackers based around feeds you dictate?
I wonder if there are some out there already and we just don’t know about them…
Hey Andy,
I think I just found one on Megite.com
They pull your public OPML file and use it to create a personal Meme Tracker for you.
Theres more info here http://blog.megite.com/?p=27
It does, however, not appear to be a very elegant solution!
I have been using Megite for ages, my SEO toolbar button used their feed which is based on the Toprank OPML, and the Scoble one uses his OPML, though I am not sure how up to date it is.
I have also been hinting quite strongly that people should be preparing to create applications based on what data might be available through MBL API
What does top favorites mean? Most of the top favorites seem to be either the highest traffic blogs which are also the most linked to, or the ones that feature a “Technorati Favorites” button more prominently.
In many ways actively promoting Technorati Favorites as a more community metric is giving it a differentiation compared to popularity based on links.
It then becomes an engagement metric, which is why I think Google included subscriber information in their patent, though they had only just launched Google Reader when they wrote the patent.
It should also be noted that Technorati could easily launch a service similar to MBL, they have most of the backend.
Yeah Technorati could, and if they did, it would mean trouble for MBL.
“Top favorites”? I haven’t seen that on Technorati! I’m missing it, and probably can’t see it now because I’m looking for it…
I can only assume based on the name that it’s something to do with the sites that have been favorited the most amount of times…
The Technorati Popular page
http://technorati.com/pop/
That has a link to top blogs by popularity (links)
http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/
But it also has a link to the top blogs by favorites
http://technorati.com/pop/blogs/?faves=1
Where I am now listed 87 (actually join 86)
By default that metric is effectively the same as the popularity from links, if you have more traffic, you will probably get links.
However a few people who are more community focused have made a lot of inroads.
Thanks for that Andy!