The End

Better not at all than not well. So, not at all, at least for a while, with the exception of an explanatory/"best of" post to possibly follow.

TiP Abroad

I finally made good on a promise to Fagistani president Joshua Gibson to contribute a piece to his blog. Gibson's foul-mouthed and always insightful commentary has been on my short list of must-reads since I discovered his blog a year ago, and he has contributed here more than once. You can read my piece, which concerns an egregious bit of journalistic mumbo-jumbo on display at the Huffington Post, here.

The Blog Belt

[Via|Link]

The State of the Art: Technorati's "Authority"

Technorati has bumped up the importance of "authority" in ranking blogs, and Technorati users want to know what it's all about. So where do they turn? Technorati, naturally. Look at this afternoon's top searches:

Unfortunately, "authority" is a word people use all the time in other contexts, so it's impossible to find posts that actually discuss the concept.

So consider this an experiment in search engineering. This post is actually about that concept of authority which Technorati users want to know about. I'll be watching it to see if it surfaces, and if so, how.

Here's what you need to know about Technorati's "authority" rankings:

On Fri. May 4th, we updated Technorati.com to include the Technorati Authority for blogs listed on the Blog page and in search results. This update changed the earlier references of "N blogs link here" and "X links from Y blogs" with the single Technorati Authority number. On the blog page, we also show the Technorati Rank.

Technorati Authority is the number of blogs linking to a website in the last six months. The higher the number, the more Technorati Authority the blog has.

It is important to note that we measure the number of blogs, rather than the number of links. So, if a blog links to your blog many times, it still only count as +1 toward your authority. Of course, new links mean the +1 will last another 180 days.

Technorati Rank is calculated based on how far you are from the top. The blog with the hightest Technorati Authority is the #1 ranked blog. The smaller your Technorati Rank, the closer you are to the top.

Since at the lower end of the scale many blogs will have the same Technorati Authority, they will share the same Technorati Rank.

The Technorati Top 100 shows the most popular 100 blogs based on Technorati Authority. The #1 ranked blog is the blog with the most other distinct blogs linking to it in the last 6 months. If your blog's rank is, say 305,316, this indicates that there are 305,315 blog ranks separating your blog from the #1 position.

The best way to increase your Technorati Authority is to write things that are interesting to other bloggers so they'll link to you. Linking to source material when you blog is also a great way to engage in conversation and help others find what you find interesting.

This is why getting linked from another blog's home page is so much better than being linked from within a post. The post expires in Technorati's 180-day calendar; the home page link is perpetually fresh.

Many bloggers who should be attending to their blogs spend as much time checking on their Technorati as on site statistics that deal in harder forms of data like hits, unique visitors, or bounce rates, and which are far more useful guides to readership. And that's the genius of Technorati's ranking system. Since there is no way of knowing how many blogs share your blog's authority level, there is no way of knowing how many blogs share your numerical rank. A blog ranked at 50,000 could actually be 1,000 or 1,000,000 blogs away from being ranked 49,999; likewise, there could be 5,000,000 or 50,000,000 blogs more popular. There's no way to tell.

Would we accept this sort of fuzzy math in any other area of our lives?

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Now Blogging at Geekdad and Sandbox World

I'm thrilled to report that I've recently been accepted as a contributor to two blogs, and I wanted to mention them to TiP readers.

Geekdad is the amazing new Wired blog that features DIY projects and other great techy stuff for dads to do with their kids. You can read my rundown of the great Fisher-Price Kid-Tough Digital Camera there, and I'll be posting about more tech-related parent-child projects there in the near future. They even have Asha Dornfest of Parenthacks onboard as a lone Geekmom. I've really enjoyed watching this new blog grow, and am thrilled to be a part of it.


Sandbox World is a prolific animation, illustration, comics and cartooning blog. Lead blogger Tony Medeiros probably looks at more stuff before breakfast than most of us do all day, and that makes Sandbox World a treasure trove of visual media, with an emphasis on reaching kids through comics.

My first post, a discussion of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis coming to the big screen, posted today. Tony sent me a link to some more clips since it posted, and they've really taken Satrapi's animation a step further with the film's textures and the inky depth of its black expanses. You can read my writeup here, and check out those extra clips here, here, and here.

Google Reader Is Even Cooler Than I Thought

I don't poke around much in Google Reader, but I have been interested in pruning my RSS reading list a bit and just discovered this feature.

Here's what my trends look like:

I heart Google Reader. If you use Google Reader and are as unobservant as I am, just click here.

Blogger Ate My Homework

I ported over to the new Blogger a week or so ago, and my 'Previous Posts' somehow became recent posts. This means that on an archived page they don't track further backwards, creating an awkward wall of silence between my most recent 15 posts and the 234 that came before it. In fact, publishing this post knocks my nod to Walt and Ub's "Egyptian Melodies" into the abyss of my blog archives. Gratuitous self-linking can only take you so far!

Clicking my way through the Previous Posts menu has been my favorite way to browse through many blogs that offer it. I can't get the label widget to show up either, and haven't braved the task of wrecking and rebuilding my template to see if that will allow me to show off a list of labels in the nav, which basically trumps Previous Posts in terms of pure browsing pleasure anyway. In the meantime, I'm bumping up my archives links to the top of the navigation so you can still browse around if you like.

If anyone knows enough about Blogger to understand how such a problem might be solved, I would appreciate your expertise. Things are getting prehistoric around here...