We all have an old friend from high school or a cousin who sends us obnoxious chain e-mails (you know, the ones that end with "Please tell everyone you know, so that people can be aware ..." or some such). Perhaps you find these to be a nuisance but of limited harm. However, these things are ultimately detrimental to the social fabric as they dilute our attention.
In the same vein, we share the concerns expressed in recent blog posts about 2000 Bloggers (read the WTF).
Jeremiah Owyang's posted
"Links are currency, and this collage is a counterfeit factory."
Read more in I don’t deserve this Technorati rank (and the other 1,999 of you don’t either)
Zoli Erdos continues
"There's a crazy meme going on which has the potential of turning Technorati ranks upside-down. Now, that may sometimes be good, giving fresh views more visibility, like Seth Godin or Steve Rubel's recent initiatives. The new 2000 Bloggers craze is nothing comparable though: it's random, viral, and has to potential to turn links, the glue of the blogosphere completely meaningless."
Read more in 2000 Bloggers Gaming Technorati and Google
We're listening to these concerns. In the same manner in which we decline to index blogs that don't meet our quality criteria (AKA "splogs"), we're loath to indulge these "chain posts" ("pain chosts", ouch). Your voice is the most important one in the blogosphere's distributed conversation. To dissuade chain posts from submerging your voice in their dilutative effects, we've updated our indexing systems on an experimental basis to filter out links of this nature. We all love photo collages of faces; we've had them, albeit on a smaller scale, on the Technorati site since last summer. However, "join us and use these links" memes such as 2000 Bloggers is really a disservice to rank measurement systems and thus this decision to change our indexing policies in that regard.
We hope these changes and many others that we have cooking will help you tap into the blogosphere to find the conversations, information and people you're looking for.
