Warren Seen

Noticed Blogcode last week, signed up and had a play, but haven’t really collected my thoughts on this one. I’ve been flat out with “real” work, etc., so have neglected to write anything this last week.

Anyway, precis on BlogCode is fairly straight forward, drop the name and url (not the feed tho) of the blog you want to code into the UI, then score the blog on a range of sliding scales covering content, tone, etc.

Neat, but essentially useless in and of itself.

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Quick follow up to the previous post - I wanted to get my thoughts out before I was influenced by anyone else’s thoughts

• Steve Rubel takes the classic high school debate approach of defining the word and building an argument from there. Conclusion - yes, it’s not authority, it’s popularity, people.
• Data mining agrees with Steve, “name things for what they are, not for what they are used for”. That is quite obviously right out of Usability 101.
• Jack Krupansky leaves an excellent comment on Scobelizer: “to Technorati, “authority” is simply popularity. That makes *no* sense.“

Consensus seems to be that tracking popularity but calling it “authority” muddies the waters… There is nothing wrong with the feature itself, it’s just the name that’s misleading.

It’s been a busy few days for me, but I’m back in time to notice this:

Technorati has just added ‘authority’ filtering to their search (see Scoble, TechCrunch, Dave Sifry, et cetera).

My issue with this is simple - the number of inbound links does NOT necessarily qualify the source as being an “authority” on anything. This is nothing more than a popularity contest.

Ben Barren hits the nail on the head here.

So its very hard to determine relative popularity, on a regional basis

Before pointing to this New York Metro quote:

In the blogosphere, the biggest audiences—and the advertising revenue they bring—go to a small, elite few. Most bloggers toil in total obscurity.

Popularity, that’s all it is. And that’s sad, because some of the people who deserve to be held as authorities in their field are lost amongst the noise, while the “blogosphere” (gack, I HATE that “word”) becomes more and more like a conversation between a panel of “A-list” bloggers with everyone else on the sideline. Then you’ve flipped from being “citizen” media to just media.

Disparate thoughts to follow…

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