Well, after my experiment of providing full feeds, I have found that Ice Rocket, Bloglines, BlogDigger, and Feedster are all picking up my links. Technorati has picked them haphazardly, and I’m not sure what BlogPulse looks for. Ditto with Clusty.
I had a couple of nice comments from folks at Feedster, and also a note from Blake Rhodes at IceRocket. I do hope that if these services look at one thing, it’s the importance of letting people know how to make sure they’re included in aggregation counts (as well as how to have their links picked up). A list is only as good as the data that feeds it. It would also be nice if they provide access to the data for our own interpretation. Even summary data would be helpful.
Personally, if I can get dynamic link counts from these services, I may try a run myself at randomly collecting static link counts, and try out my ‘popularity to influence’ ratio, just for grins and giggles.
Most importantly, I’ve heard from some of you about how happy you are that I’m providing full feeds. I hope that folks still continue to visit the site; otherwise, I won’t know who is reading any particular post. I especially hope that folks leave comments now and again. But I want my writing to be read, and if full feeds helps, then I’m for it. The full feeds stay.
Additionally, if you’re interested in knowing when I add photos to Flickr, you can access my photo syndication feed here. There’s also a RSS 2.0 syndication feed, and I’m assuming the Flickr folks are updating the Atom feed to the newly released 1.0 specification.
Well, that is until I release Eve 1.0. Then I’ll be using Eve 1.0 all the way.
update
Koan Brenner has been having an interesting time with Technorati and how links are accessed and valued. I think the introduction of tags into the discussion has clouded the issue, because as far as I know, tags have nothing to do with how links are accessed, stored, valued, or used in any ranking algorithm.
If they are used, then yes, Technorati has some flaws in its reasoning.
Bluntly, to folks who run these services: time to come out and tell us how outbound links are accessed and stored, and what factors could prevent them from being recorded. More, it’s time to think about full disclosure on ranking schemes. Dropping hints and tidbits in this post or another is just going to create that much more animosity.
If you are degrading links based on time, or other factors influenced by the tech people use, it’s critical that this information be disseminated. You’re basically penalizing people for not using technology in a way that you assume it should be used, and that’s a sucky way of determining ‘popularity’, ‘influence’, and, especially, ‘authority’.
As for disclosure of techniques and spamming — I’m not sure this is the same issue with weblog-related lists as it is with Google. It’s an issue, I’m just not sure it’s the same issue. This one could definitely use some more discussion.
