{rant}

I have written before about my woes with Technorati.

Scott told me about a blog post I was mentioned in so I decided to seek it out. No result on blogsearch.google so I headed over to IceRocket and then Technorati. They both had the reference.

Well this got me to futzing around on Technorati. Yet another unsuccessful attempt to claim my blog. Well half way unsuccessful. Since I have switched to advanced templates on typepad, I thought that using the js method to claim my blog might work. It did not. I decided to try and change the reference URL.

Now FoG is using something called domain forwarding. Essentially blog.weatherby.net points to forceofgood.typepad,.com. I changed the URL of the blog I was trying to claim from the former to the latter. It went though. Oh joy! So now I can claim one URL immediatley. Technorati has not recognized the other for 21 days.

But wait. The end result is that the blog I successfully claimed actually had less traffic and less references than the blog that I can not claim and I now have two blogs in Technorati that appear to be unrelated. After some digging I believe that is is related to a domain mapping vs. domain forwarding issue. I get that and will solve it, but there is no reference to this in the Technorati knowledgebase. My guess this is a pretty common problem. Regardless it does not surprise me given the lack of responsiveness of their customer service to my support submissions to address this issue.

And then it dawned on me. I had read Arrington’s post this morning. Which lead to the Valleywag, which is dead nuts on.

Technorati lacks focus. Technorati claims ot be “the recognized authority on what’s happening on the World Live Web, right now.”

What the heck does that mean?

Are they a blog community? A blog traffic measurement tool? A blog search engine? If the latter they are the only search engine where I have to constantly manuallly ping to get them to notice me. If I am lucky.

Across all three of these potentials a complete product offering is sorely lacking. They are unfocused.

Technorati’s recent numbers are impressive. But unless they start offering a focused easy to use complete solution to something I fear they will be heading the other way in the future.

{/rant}