Technorati: Long Way Left to Go

As directed during class today, I checked out Technorati's website. I set up an account, profile, and claimed my Purdue 106 Blog.

I scanned through the article by Dave Sifry, "The State of the Blogosphere," and learned the following interesting bits of information:

• As of February 2006, there are 27.2 million weblogs in existence
• Technorati tracks as many as 75,000 new blogs created daily and a growing collection of two billion links
  
• 1.2 million new posts are created each day, an average of 50,000 per hour, with 400,000 of these being tagged posts
• Hot topics today (6 Feb 2006) were Politics, Technology, Gardening, and Erotica

I confess that I did not finish navigating through the hand-out during the lab today, mostly because I was still busy learning about cool stuff on Technorati. I learned something that I have never thought about before. I was already aware that Google is known for state-of-the-art anti-spamming algorithms. Their company is constantly working to eliminate participation with "click fraud" -- new term for me today, which I found well-defined at Wikipedia -- as well as any web code designed to force prospective customers to go places against their will (webspam). The part I had never thought about is that Google has the difficult task of bolstering defenses not only in English, but also in every other language on the web, to the best of their ability. This was demonstrated in Google's blog article, written by Matt Cutts, regarding webspam and the bold move of telling BMW that until they clean up the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) code on their german sites, all related pages will be removed from the Google index. Here's the exact statement from Matt:

"So automobile.de, when you believe your pages are clean enough to be reincluded in Google, send us a Google reinclusion request. We’ll need to hear about who suggested the SEO idea of JavaScript redirects not only on automobile.de, but on other domains such as http://www.automobile-versicherung.de/ and http://www.automobile-finanzierung.de/ and http://www.automobile-leasing.de/ and http://www.neuwagen-jahreswagen.de/ ."

Wow. BMW has always impressed me as a powerful company. But where does anyone and everyone go to find something on the internet? Google. I am grateful to Google for keeping the customer in mind:

"...Search engine users in other countries and languages are just as tired of webspam as American users, and they deserve the best quality that Google can provide."

In conclusion I'll say that I spent time getting familiar with Technorati. I did not even finish adding tags to my blog space, creating a watchlist, or getting to the two other directed sites (Alexa and PubSub). I am consuming all of this new information, but there is still a long way to go.