4 ms·
The Technorati Generation
- PaulHoule 4y agoBack in the day I had 3 blogs and at least 30 splogs meant to promote the blogs. I thought it was a hoot that the rat would index my splogs but not index my blogs.
- bitwize 4y agoHow out of touch am I that I don't know what a splog is, nor what Technorati was?
- marginalia_nu 4y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_blog https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spam_blog
- Apocryphon 4y agoI remember when Technorati was around all the time and still don't know what it was until this article.
- PaulHoule 4y agoA lot of people had that problem. The subtext of their marketing, like the fediverse today, was ‘move on folks, nothing to see here’ so far as normies were concerned.
- gradschoolfail 4y agoYou are not the rati they were looking for XD
- PaulHoule 4y agoThe splogs were synthetically generated and formed an inverted pyramid. They were full of links to other sites, most of which were ‘cover traffic’ to conceal that the point of the splogs was linking to my blogs. There were maybe 10 inner circle splogs that linked directly to my blogs, then 20 outer circle splogs that linked to the inner circle splogs. I could direct the lowest quality links in large numbers to the outer circle splogs and not be afraid that they’d discredit my blogs. The are numerous advantages of this approach, one of them is that you could get 1 link in a directory to your blog but 30 links to 30 splogs. People might say this is a short cut but no you have to do all the legitimate link building for the blogs plus a lot of illegitimate link building for the splogs, it is like anabolic steroids in that it helps somebody who is doing all the right stuff go even further. What’s really the best is if your competitors are doing the same and you find out where they get their cover traffic from and inject your own links so they wind up spamming for your benefit or spamming stuff so bad it gets them busted.
- umeshunni 4y agoI had completely forgotten about it, but it was a popular blog search tool in the mid-2000s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technorati https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technorati Part of the early Web 2.0 crowd along with blogger, flickr, delicious etc.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pram 4y agoI remember at the time there was some grousing in places (slashdot, something awful etc) about “Web 2.0” and the low quality of blogging. It’s quaint now considering how low things have gotten with social media. Also I’m amused Blogger is still around and hasn’t had the “our amazing journey” treatment.
- adlpz 4y agoSlightly off-topic: what a fantastic time that was. The "blogosphere" times were, if you squint enough, the perfect web. Independent publishers (bloggers) associating freely (rings, networks), making federated content (RSS) and independent curation (slashdot et al) tying it all together. SEO was in its infancy and algorithms too primitive. Bliss. Not sure what went wrong. AdSense? Google? Social networking? But somehow the platforms and blogspam ate it all.
- apricot13 4y agoI don't think sponsored posts and 'career blogging' helped either. Before that blogging was usually personal, prompted good discussions and was descriptive until the goal seemed to become getting sponsored posts. Writing became less important and posts were mostly just incredible photos with links out to sponsors. The tone of writing changed too, it became more 'twee' with very little substance and when one blog became successful people copied it until we got to a point where every blog was a copy of each other all with editorial type layouts incredible photography but very little of what made the sites popular in the first place. (I will caveat this with the note that this was more in the personal, fashion, food, interior design, design blogging world)