Time To Upgrade This Mothership

OK, a busy weekend of golf and I’m back at the computer realising I need to update the look and features of this site. Andrew Jones has a blogpost today on Technorati rankings and whilst I think comparing ranking numbers is pretty sad (in the way that men comparing themselves to other men always is), it does raise a very valid point.

Technorati has emerged as a clear leader in finding blog content and this blog is far from optimised to technorati (overall and in terms of blog tags). I have found a lot of great blogs by searching the blogs that link to them on technorati. It is a way to navigate the readership of the blogs you read. Very cool. So technorati optimisaion is my little project for the week. [Links to Technorati and Technorati profiles previously used in this post no longer work]

UPDATE:

Odd things are happening! I tagged this blog and it appeared on the Emerging Church tag list (way down, which is fine by me). Then, it disappeared! Not there. I got to wondering and stumbled upon a VERY interesting blogpost by Masood Mortazavi where he outlines the way existing technorati users can gatekeep tags.

“What this means is that if there are enough users organized to remove someone from a particular topic, they’ll be able to do it. This is rule of the masses, not the rule of the free expression of ideas, and while I don’t have anything against the masses, I have always found suppression of ideas quite reprehensible. What is even worse in my case is my prolific use of the tags, which have taken me to several dozen different topics. I find it ridiculous that the writer is limited to the use of only 20 tags. That might work for an advertising agency working for a corporation but it doesn’t quite work for the free-wheeling blogger. As a lite-relativist, I’ve always had trouble with expertise being defined in such narrow ways. I spent my graduate years trying to escape it and now here we have a system that can do quite a bit of good in bringing you to greater number of readers but that puts restraints on how you stream your thoughts and what you write about. So, I’m out.”

Very interesting. I immediately started to wonder if this kind of thing was happening to my tags on Technorati. For a while know I’ve been wondering about the blogautocracy that seems to exist and this has got me imagining all sort of Machivellian goings on. To be honest all this is just not for me.