This week’s announcements from Technorati have been mixed with endorsements and a message that Technorati may work better with one weblog platform than another.
The Technorati tags help file contains an inline advertisement for TypePad. I could understand the use of Flickr and del.icio.us as the current most prominent uses of tags by the online community, but endorsing a weblog hosting company in your help file stinks of paid placement.
Adding rel=”tag” to any link should be enough to build a tag library for links off the link text. Technorati instead grabs the last part of the URL after the “/” and treats it as a post tag. I was hoping for a decentralized del.icio.us implementation.
Claiming your weblog using the Blogger or Metaweblog API after discovering the availability of such services via RSD is cool, and may have been specially built for Tucows but Movable Type, TypePad, Blogger, and other weblog platforms can use the feature just as well.
As you continue to grow and figure out how to make money please remember your users and content producers you rely on publish on a variety of tools and may look to you for guidance on how to create more structured content for your benefit or send some business your way.
If you feel strongly enough, the TechnoratiBot visits from IP address 209.237.230.104. If you ever wanted to block Technorati adding “Deny from 209.237.230.104” to your htaccess file would do the trick. I see no requests from Technorati for robots.txt so you cannot exclude through the robot exclusion standard and Technorati does not seem to obey the robots meta tag. Currently an IP is the only way to stop Technorati from indexing your content.
Update: I chatted with Bradley and Derek from Technorati this morning. The TypePad link was inserted as a tip to get people started with weblogs. The link has been removed from the staging server instance of the page. Excluding pages from Technorati indexing was not on their radar since they figured a ping is explicit action to crawl. A new bug was created to look at ways to exclude crawlers from indexing your content such as the robots meta tag. Hosted sites such as Blogger, Live Journal, and Six Apart cannot define robot exclusions in robots.txt for your millions of users and stay under the file size limit of about 50 kilobytes.