Blogging about Blogging

My job is offering a program that's intended to help the library staff learn about new web 2.0 technologies, blogging and the internet in general. Last week we were assigned to create a blog, having done that years ago I just sent in a link to this one. Today's task is to head on over to technorati and check out the blog search.

Some history about myself and Technorati. I first heard of Technorati long long ago, maybe 2003-ish. And then it was a great resource. It helped me find blogs with interesting info and was generally GOOD at what it did.

Back then I was using livejournal, though it wasn't so much as a blog but as a social networking site amongst my college friends. Thank the FSM that live journal lets you delete your old content, I hope there's no cache floating around somewhere to be discovered 20 years from now. 

Then the spam blogs started showing up and Technorati was helpless to their onslaught. You couldn't find a single link out of the top 20 in any news worthy topic that wasn't a spam blog. Now, I think this was probably partially the fault of the free blog engines like blogger, live journal, and wordpress. Now, blogger and wordpress have gotten better at weeding out the spam blogs and Technorati hasn't gotten better at ignoring them. Take this search, from today, for a common topic, one near and dear to my heart, World of Warcraft. [click for bigger view]

If you're a savvy user you might notice that the first post is about gold farming, not a great sign. You should also notice the domain name that is completely unrelated to the subject matter. That is a spam blog, and it's still first on the list on Technorati. This is so disappointing. Technorati used to be great, but now...

Now, to be a little less of a curmudgeon how about something I like? Technorati's top blogs is great, it reminds me of which feeds I need to read to keep up with internet news. Browsing through their top 100 list gave me a couple new feeds to add to my Google reader feed. I also signed up for an account to get this blog registered and recognized by Technorati. Maybe I'll get some more traffic or something. Anyways.

Regards,
-Benjamin