Jason Clarke

Sorry, but Technorati SUCKS. I used them many times per hour for several months last summer- probably about 20 times a day, six days a week- and the service was invaluable to me. It was my #1 web service of the year for 2004.

But for the past several months, Technorati’s response time has been unforgivably abysmal. They’re horrendously slow, and for the last four weeks, I have been ZERO-FOR-10 in searches. That means the last ten times I’ve searched the site, I’ve gotten this message:

Sorry, we couldn’t complete your search because we’re experiencing a high volume of requests right now. Please try again in a minute or add this search to your watchlist to track conversation.

That is unacceptable by any standard.

Can I keep going? Sorry again, but I do not like the new website. If you’re going to shift your strategy towards mainstream, make sure you’re hardware/infastructure is 110% FIRST. But that new design? Too green, too round, and tooooo frickin’ busy.

Please, Technorati, don’t try to be Yahoo: don’t be the public service of the living web.

Just deliver results.

I’m adding a new personal tag to my del.icio.us habit/space: “toread”. It’s, obviously, stuff I want to read later on. So then I’ll use the automagically generated del.iciou.us feed of that tag to dump back into my RSS reader (making sure to set the feed *not* to expire after I open it) so that I have a one-stop place to return to read stuff that I don’t have time to dive into when I first happen upon it.

Taking it back to the social angle (although del.icio.us is primarily a social tool, I think it’s myriad personal uses are equally huge and vastly undervalued - or at least vastly un-discussed), I can then add a new section to this site called “what I’m reading” and use BigBold’s RSS Digest to output the feed dynamically onto this site.

The web is pretty cool right now, huh?

I love Ta-da…and I’m going to start using my Backpack soon, I promise.

Last week, I was messing around with this site and stumbled onto what might’ve been a scoop had I actually posted it in time. Here’s what I wrote then but never published:

Tired of that pretty limited “put Flickr photos on your site” widget that Flickr calls a badge?

Well by accident last week, I stumbled across a new version of the badge-maker not yet live on Flickr. Check it out (make sure you’re logged in to your account first):

http://flickr.com/badge_new.gne

The badge_new.gne page is already live on Flickr’s site. No scoop for me.

Flickr’s announcement here.

As usual, there’s tons of great stuff over at Micropersuasion (is that the laziest post intro ever?), including this long, descriptive post about Yahoo’s new 360 mega-social networking service.

Apparently, 360 will combo blogs, profiles, photos, and more into one uber-service, which goes public March 29th. Related item: as part of yesterday’s Remaindered Links feed, Jason Kottke tossed out this bone regarding some recent Yahoo! aquisition rumors:

Looks like Yahoo! has created its own version of Livejournal (blogs + social networking)…Flickr will fit into this nicely. ; )