Jason Clarke

BusinessWeek’s Blogspotting reports that Technorati has struck “exclusive deals” with some blog utilities to be pinged first before any other services (such as weblogs.com or Pingomatic) are notified that your blog has been updated.

So what? Is this a big deal?

It might not be, except for the fact that despite this alleged advantage, Technorati is still dreadfully slow and often misses a small to medium share of relevant data per site.

Over last weekend, I spent a good amount of time updating Network Landscape, the TV/DVD/movies weblog I publish.

Besides a fresh design, the site got a new RSS feed, enhanced “quick news” section, leaner code, an update to its underlying blog software, and some other tweaks.

Over the next few weeks, the site will be roaring back to life, with writer Henry Hanks reviewing much of this season’s new crop of shows. We’ll also have some great giveaways, like LOST season 1 on DVD and more.

Check it out and feel free to send your feedback.

Step one: read this article by Ben Stein defending George Bush.

Step two: If you are a blogger and you truly, seriously, honestly, blame George Bush for the hurricane, please call me and explain why. Check to make sure you’re sane first, because like most humans on earth I’m often quite busy.

Because, see, I’m not going to know the reasoning behind your belief that George Bush is the cause and effect of the hurricane. That’s because I am delinking and deleting ANY blogger from my blogroll, RSS feed, and headspace who dares to suggest that an act of God (or whatever YOU call it) was caused by our President.

Bloggers who I’ve already wiped from my life:

Dave Winer

I’ve been woefully remiss in following up on my posts last week regarding my switch from Technorati to IceRocket (if you missed it, CEO’s of both companies commented here last week).

Now comes a post from that other Jason (hehe), Weblogs, Inc. network prez Jason Calacanis. He’s not only fed up with Technorati, he’s asked his partner, Brian Alvey, to remove all embedded links to Technorati across all 80+ of the Weblogs, Inc. network sites:

Brian: Can you take Technorati out of the Linking Blogs link across the Weblogs, Inc. network and replace them with IceRocket?

So, last week I announce that I’m flipping my Technorati links over to IceRocket links…then today, Jason Calacanis, one of the world’s most influential blog publishers, announces the same!

Jason goes a bit further and offers some good advice to Technorati:

I think the company has a focus issue. They always seem to be busy doing odd side projects like mobile, Live8, the redesign and CNN. If I was running that company I would focus on one thing and one thing only: the quality of the search results. That’s it. That’s the only reason Technorati exists and that’s the thing they are doing worst.

I said something quite similar, but not as eloquent, in my first post on the topic:

If you’re going to shift your strategy towards mainstream, make sure you’re hardware/infastructure is 110% FIRST…Please, Technorati, don’t try to be Yahoo: don’t be the public service of the living web.

Just deliver results.

To be honest, I’m a bit surprised the changeover at the Weblogs, Inc. network didn’t happen sooner. After all, Technorati’s performance has been quite awful for some time now, and as Jason says in his post, he’s been complaning about them since February or so. Besides, if I’m not mistaken (don’t you find that people who write that often are?), Weblogs, Inc. blogger and investor Mark Cuban is also an investor in IceRocket.

Congrats to my friend Tom Biro for landing a great new gig with MWW. Biro, one of the ‘bloggiest’ people I know, is now Director, New Media Strategies for the New Jersey-based PR firm. Here’s his announcement.

I first ‘met’ Tom via our mutual friend, Bob Cox, and since have had the pleasure of working with him on various Media Bloggers Association projects.

I was glad to have finally met Tom in person at BlogNashville this past May, where I regret not thanking him in person for introducing me to several interesting people. He also got me going on LinkedIn (the social networking site he thanks in part for his new job) and is due a large share of credit for finally getting me off my anti-RSS-reading high horse.

In Biro’s new position, he’ll be directing MWW’s blog strategies, and in that area he’s no slouch. Almost every day of the week, you can find him blogging at AdJab, The Media Drop, or Tom Biro’s spot.

Back in January, I published a lengthy interview with him on his then-new blog, as well as RSS reading, online advertising, and more.

Best of luck to you, Tom.

In my previous post, I mentioned that I’ve swapped out my Technorati search results link on each post over to an IceRocket search results function.

There’s more to it: I’m also dropping my 10+ Technorati RSS feeds (Customized RSS feeds of my blog’s name, my name, and other topics of interest as they flow into Technorati). In favor, I’ll be replacing all these feeds with feeds on the same subjects, except these will be sourced from IceRocket’s search results.

The trial is on: Over the next few days, I’ll be keeping an eye on IceRocket’s search results and closely monitoring (like Wolf Blitzer) the results. I’ll report back soon.

Not having much experience with their data, I will say that the company is off to a great start PR-wise though: In my previous post, Blake Rhodes, IceRocket CEO, left a comment thanking me for trying out the service.

How did he find this site? Well, I’m just guessing here, but I checked my referral logs and noticed a recent visitor came in from http://blogs.icerocket.com/search?q=Icerocket…that’s circumstantial evidence suggesting that perhaps Mr. Rhodes was using his own service to track word about his service. The owner of a company who uses his own tool- that’s always a good sign!

In keeping with my recent rail against Technorati, I just updated the part of this site that automatically linked Technorati search results from the post (it was right over to the left there, under “Comments”).

Now, I’m linking you to results from Icerocket, a search engine. It’s just a trial, so let me know your thoughts on Icerocket’s blog search results.

Another note: Last week I was asking for help setting up Orb. I did get Orb running, but I haven’t had much of a chance to play with it yet. It’s pretty far down on the list of “things to do to be totally moved in to our new house (a novel-length list).”

Last week, I reached the breaking point with Technorati and abandoned the service I called my “Web service of the year” for 2004.

This week, Jason Kottke reaches the breaking point and says So Long, Technorati himself.

Dear Blogosphere,

Please, please, please, STOP using the word “mashups”. It’s a stupid, ugly word, much dumber and lamer than the word “blog.”

And you’re using it way, way, way, too much.

My former high school speech club coach Mike Daisey was “busted” by a blogger for hotlinking to one of the images on her blog- and Mike responded with a reasoned rebuttal.

At first glance you’d probably side with Martha, the blogger whose image Mike re-posted on his site. But that’s why it’s often fun to get deeper into an issue- because that’s where the complexity lies. See, the image Mike linked to wasn’t one of Martha’s own creation, nor is it owned by her. She- keeper of the blog “Your Daily Art“- was meerely linking to a famous painting, available on innumerable other websites (not to mention offline places) throughout the world.

So in linking to the image from her site, Mike makes two arguments in his defense. The first, which I don’t tend to agree with on principle, is that there should be no problem for Martha since his site receives “modest” traffic and hence isn’t likely to cause any realisticaly negative effects on Martha’s website or life (negative effects might include bandwith overage charges; largely irrelevant here since Martha’s site is hosted on Blogger UPDATE: Per the comments below, Martha’s husband Jerry alerts me to the fact that her site is not hosted on Blogger, but on their own web space. My regrets for the error).

Mike’s second argument, which rings much truer in this case (in large part because it’s not conditional) asserts that he wasn’t stealing per se, since Martha’s original posting of the image (one she neither created nor owns) was no different than his own re-posting. Here, Mike’s defense that his site isn’t likely to cause any unfriendly bandwidth problems for Martha’s blog make sense, since in this scenario that appears to be the only potential wrong that could arise as a direct result of his hotlinking Martha’s image (or, more accurately, the image on Martha’s site).

The brunt of Mike’s defense:

It’s also patently absurd that once we’ve moved onto the web, and are living in an era when we put images there that can be instantly downloaded to any location on earth and duplicated digitally millions of times we’re arguing about credit. Not credit for creating the artwork, mind you, but “credit” for hosting–a shared act that every server on the WWW performs every day or you’d never be able to even read this site. Sure there are examples when folks can be linked to and cause massive traffic problems, but I doubt that’s happening today, and if it were a possibility I would exercise some natural diligence.

Perhaps the safest route is for Mike (or anyone in his position) to simply right-click, save the image, and serve it from his own website (or Flickr account?)