About a week ago I posted a lament about Technorati over at connexions.

It was funny, Technorati is a link tracking tool I’ve found indespensible as an average blogger. It was a surprise to see Technortic CEO Dave Sifry pop over, (considering the service monitors about 7 million blogs) and ask what the problem was.
Imagine. A purposeful none geek trying to say what doesn’t work.
Gotta love blogging.

I don’t know how to read the host log for BDBO properly, I don’t understand the nuanced differences between a session or a hit or a cache, because I don’t care. It looks nice, the colours are interesting, but so what?
I have no intention of learning, life is too short.
Put me in front of an MT help page and I zone faster than the snooze during a sermon.
I hate reading tech-talk because I don’t understand it.
And most really good coders, programmers and technicans find it very difficult to communicate to those of us who are never going to learn the language.

What I care about is touching base with bloggers that take time to stop by and link. Talking to readers. If blogging can’t be about people, our lives, concerns, conversations and exchanges, what’s the point?

If you needed an MA in computer programming to blog, this medium would still be in the hands of technicans. But it isn’t.
And blogging isn’t going to go the way of user threads.
Ordinary everyday computer users are setting up blogs at a rate of 30 to 40 thousand a day.

MT - the platform of this blog, has a trackback feature. In other words, if someone else is using MT and they link, they can send a ‘ping’ to let me know.

That’s great except for two things. It only reads MT-type blogs and it is suspectible to spam. Trackback spam is a real pain.
It’s second to comment spam.
Even though I have 99% of posts closed off, I’m still seeing it show up every day.

Which brings me back to Technorati.
There are a lot of link tracking services available for bloggers.
They work if you’ve signed up.
Bloggers owe a great deal to the technicans who designed them and work tirelessly to improve them.

By far the best linking tracking tool to date has been Technorati.
It’s great for a none geek.
I don’t want to enter passwords, sign my life away, get past ads, wait; I just want to see who linked.
I think bloggers are a bit addicted to the instanteous communication this meduim brings. I post, someone comments or links; and the interactivity can be interesting, frustrating, productive, moving, funny, informative.

The last few months Technorati hasn’t been it’s old self. It’s burped. It’s not loaded. It’s not updated for days. It’s held every link for months.
It was if it was groaning under it’s own success.

The joy of Technorati has been “rank by most recent.” Only a blogger can appreciate that.:^)

If you are a blogger or thinking about becoming one and want to grasp how quickly this medium is growing, head over and read State of the Blogosphere. Part One looks at the rapid growth of blogging as new platforms become available. Part Two looks at posting volume. A few surprises there. Many bloggers are not only sticking with this hobby, we are posting more consistently than even a year ago.

So thanks to designers, and technicans and coders.
Thanks for tools that don’t ask me to be a tech-speaking whiz or sign over my second cousin on my fathers side.
Thanks for tools that don’t put up registration hassles or bury me in advertising.
And Technorati, I hope things get sorted out.
Mr. Sifry, you have designed a cool, clean tool that has literally enabled this blogger to see the connections to hundreds of interesting people with interesting things to say from all over the world.