Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Miscellaneous’ Category

One of the striking differences of this election vs previous ones is that there is an appreciation that a significant proportion of the French population lives overseas.

Whilst I was over in Belfast last month James and John separately discovered the treasure trove of toys in the roofspace and, boy is it a treasure trove, as they’ve been living in that house since I was three.

As you know, I was one of the first to repost the 2kbloggers list last Thursday and in common with Bob and Chino had my blog suspended from Technoratis listings temporarily (Angela by chance didn’t make the list clickable). It would have been rather more than a temporary suspension but for the words of wisdom from Bob.

Now, Technorati have gotten around to replying to us as to the reason for the suspension in a comment on Bob’s site. Seems that were a substantial number of the 2kbloggers to have similarly reposted the list, their whole ranking system would have become worthless. Their reasoning is that their system is intended to give high rankings to blogs which get a lot of relevant links.

Emm, guys€¦ if that’s the case, how come you allow the growth of blog reviews’ as a side-line to the likes of John Chow? For that matter, how come you allow the growth of blog review blogs at all? After all, the link that I have on this blog to bloggyaward is hardly a relevant outbound link to me, is it? (Although the words of wisdom from Mr Bloggy will be getting acted on in due course).

This isn’t to knock John Chow who, after all, is only out to make a buck online as are most of us. I’m just asking, how come it’s OK for him to run a long series of blog review’ competitions for his blog and thereby gather up hundreds if not thousands of inbound links, yet it’s not OK for those on the 2kblogger list to do the same?

To my mind, it highlights a severe weakness in the Technorati system. If they want the system to rank blogs on the basis of relevant links then those are the only links that they should count. They’re probably going to turn around and say that it’s impossible to distinguish a relevant link from an irrelevant one but that’s not the case. At a simplistic level, it would be relatively easy for them to only count links from site A to site B where A had more than one link to B. That in itself would exclude any irrelevant cross-linking that might happen from a spread of the 2kblogger list and the like.

After all, how long is it going to be before some awkward sod like myself decides to set up several thousand one page blogs all pointing to their main blog? For that matter, what will happen when (and it will be “when”, not “if”) someone runs up, say, 25,000 one page blogs and thereby ends up in the top 10 on Technorati?

All this, of course, aside from the freedom of speech angle. Actually, knowing bloggers, I’d be quite worried about that particular angle being taken up if I were in Technorati at the moment. There’s a LOT of support for freedom of expression out there in blog-land.

Ironically though, that 2kblogger post has actually attracted a growing number of relevant posts to my blog. So, yes, almost 1800 people now have a link from me that’s not too relevant but I correspondingly have links back which are relevant. In fact, I’ve found that looking at irrelevant’ blogs often turns up relevant links for me, hence all the click-throughs from me to those that look at my site.

Whilst we might complain about the volume of dog poo in France, at least they have the little trucks to clean it up in the towns.But, why is it that this seems to be the most ignored sign in the world? After all, the penalty on this particular sign is £500 and that sum seems fairly typical of the fines imposed in other countries.