Technorati simply can’t cope with new forms of blogging and RSS feed generation. I am not talking about splogs, which seem to still be rampant, and reblogs, likewise, but totally legitimate alternative unique content sources that are effectively blogs.

coComment

Not too long ago, coComment introduced the ability to be able to claim your coComment feed on Technorati, and went to the trouble of creating a very integrated claim wizard.

Within a few days, the very legitimate coComment feeds full of unique content were filling up Technorati links pages. It seems Technorati swiftly took action and decided that coComments feeds were not blogs, and silently nerfed them.

coComment feeds are not splogs, they are a record of activity all over the web that contain content directly linked to individual people, and real discussions.
Technorati could use coComment as a way to filter out splogs, because blogs that don’t get comments might be a good indication of splogs and reblogs.

Twitter

Twitter allows you to post a Technorati claim. I have claimed my Twitter feed, and so have a couple of my friends. Update: Paul has written about doing so here now.

Twitter also has a blogroll of sorts. There are links on the sidebar to the people you are following which are links Technorati can see.

The result if people claim their Twitter account in Technorati and their friends do the same is clear to see.

Now what happens if you are a Twitter user like Robert Scoble with 100s, actually over 1000 followers.

Not all of Robert’s followers have claimed their feeds, and Technorati hasn’t found them all, but that won’t take long.

Technorati Can’t Cope

coComment is very legitimate user generated content – if I fed my coComment feed into a blog, it would be looked on by Technorati as legitimate, so why negate it’s effects only days after it was introduced?

Twitter is actually less legitimate than coComment – you are limited to very few characters unlike blog comments which can often be longer than many blog posts.
Twitter has a Blog Roll of sorts, that is providing cross linking, and soon Robert Scobles Twitter might enter the Technorati Top 100 – you only need 3300 blogs linking to a blog to hit the Technorati 100 currently, Robert already has 1000 followers and I am sure he will easily clock up more very quickly.
The problem for Technorati is that Robert’s Twitter feed is legitimate content on a different platform, and that people are choosing to link to him from their “Twitter Rolls”

Blog Rolls

One of the reasons blogs that are part of blog networks gain Technorati rankings fast is their sitewide links to other blogs in the network.
As I pointed out recently when defending 2000 Bloggers, there are blogs that are part of blog networks that haven’t posted for more than a year, but due to blogrolls have very high Technorati ranks, without any links from within the content.

Widgets, Plugins and Themes

Various members of the WordPress development team used to dominate the Technorati Top 100 because of the default blogroll links. Nothing wrong with the links which are well deserved, everything wrong for Technorati counting them.

Currently the best way to game Technorati is to create widgets and themes with links to the author. Technorati picks them up as links from the blog.
Some of the widgets can do this in quite a collective way, such as community blogroll widgets that add 100s of cross links to all members of the community. Then again they are only doing the same as “legitimate” blog networks.

How to Fix Technorati

Technorati have to change the way they look on links completely, and only count links within content. That may mean their spiders have to start working in a totally different way, and current link totals will twist real results for 6 months.

Technorati should be counting alternative blogging platforms such as coComment and Twitter, but again, they should only count links from within the content.

Twitter is dominating Techmeme today.

I love Pete Cashmore’s timeline of blogging, Marshall Kirkpatrick did a “sitting on the fence” roundup, (i.e. unbiased reporting), and Brian Alvey put a unique perspective on things, (he should be thinking of adding a Twitter widget to Blogsmith for a USP).

A little over 2 months ago, I spent some time trying to claim my coComment RSS feed in Technorati.
I was able to enter the feed and have it listed in Technorati as unclaimed, but I couldn’t claim it.

So I went to the coComment forum and submitted a feature request.

Claim in Technorati
I would love a way to complete a claim for my comments on Technorati.
This is something I can do with other services such as Clipmarks.

Christophe from coComment replied

Re: Claim in Technorati
This is something we definitly have on our roadmap. So, stay tuned, this might come soon.

A bit later Jessica Doyle, one of my readers also nudged them with a very enthusiastic comment

Re: Claim in Technorati

Yes, this would be a welcome development. As a blogger we can have multiple conversations going on at any time. Hope you can make this a reality, Christophe. I’ll be pretty excited when one can claim their comments as their own on technorati.

Think about the links that would be created between bloggers solely through comments. One’s cocomments are a blog unto themselves. This would allow the reader, user, searcher to not only see blog posts but all respective comments pertaining to that post.

I would contact technorati. smile Ask them if they would like to intergrate a comments search along with the video, book and blog search in existence now. Wow. This could be cool.

The New coComments.com Technorati Claim System

It has taken 2 months, and I had almost given up hope. I really wanted was to be able to paste a small piece of HTML code to claim my comments feed as mine.

The guys at coComments have excelled themselves, and created a superb integrated system of comments and blogs.

They inserted a very innocent looking link in your settings:-

Clicking the link brings up an impressive wizard to walk you through the integration process:-

Follow the steps and you end up with a claimed feed, just like another blog – oh dear, there is a lot more content in this feed than on most blogs.

Whatever you do, don’t forget the final step – even more magic

My coComments are now assigned to my blogs

This last feature is beyond what I was looking for, and actually I haven’t yet worked out the benefits. It will probably make finding a particular comment thread easier on someone’s blog in the future.
coComments is a great way of monitoring your comments on different blogs. It does have a few bugs, such as whenever I plan to submit to Digg, I switch it off otherwise I end up with a number of submission requests appearing in my feed, and on a few WordPress sites using certain spam hacks the comment submission gets broken. During Blogger beta things were pretty weird, so I also switch off there as well.

For Tech Bloggers

A few weeks back coComment announced company formation and significant investment. They have also moved into the Japaneese market.

Today they also announced that Nicolas Dengler, who whilst at Swisscom Innovations was responsible for the initial development of coComment, joins the company as Chief Architect.

coComment is certainly one of them

They provide some javascript to add to your blog template, or there is a very easy to install coComment plugin for WordPress.

It took me 5 minutes total, and I went the plugin route but could have just as easily added code to my template.

Hopefully it is useful for both me and my readers

Recently I have been tracking a lot of blog comments by email subscriptions. It isn’t an ideal method, especially on a business blog, because comment spam can get through the filters. If you value your domain, don’t send out email from it, especially email which you have no control of the content.

I have also tried tracking by subscribing to RSS feeds for the comments on various posts, but that makes a mess of my RSS reader.

I am going to see how coComment performs.