Working on this week’s Carnival of Hurricane Relief, I tried to use technorati’s search facility to find blog postings related to the carnival. Much to my dismay and increasing irritation, a large percentage of the listed blogs were “roboblogs.”
That’s what I’ve taken to calling blogs that chug along with no human intervention, new material supplied by RSS feeds with no original content provided by the blog’s owner. They exist, apparently, to attract click-throughs on the accompanying ads. They are a negative example of Yaro Stanak’s niche-content websites that I wrote about earlier.
The problem of screening out roboblogs greatly diminished when I switched from technorati to Google’s blog search. Whatever method Google uses to select websites as blogs appears to greatly lower the number of roboblogs in the mix. (Google’s blog search also included websites that I myself wouldn’t characterize as blogs but as news sites. Somehow that isn’t as irritating.)
This should be viewed as a serious problem for technorati, since the inclusion of roboblogs greatly dimishes the utility of their service, and thereby its value. To protect its business, technorati should consider how to differentiate between blogs with a live blogger supplying the posts, and roboblogs.
Until they do, I will search blogs using google. That’s bad for technorati’s business, and frustrating and disappointing for me.
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Carnival of the Capitalists 12/19/2005
Welcome to the Carnival of the Capitalists and my second time hosting the COTC. Note that several people tried to submit multiple posts – when that happened, I picked just one to include this week. Many thanks to Silflay Hraka
[...] In an earlier post, I complained about what I was calling “roboblogs” and how they’re lowering the value of search engines like Technorati. [...]