Ed Bilodeau

This weblog had moved: http://www.coolweblog.com/bilodeau/

# Notice (Oct 19/05): So ends my stay here on Blogger. This morning Google implemented an anti-spam 'feature' that forces me to answer a challenge phrase when I want to post to my own blog. No notice of the change, nothing. Worse is that it doesn't even work! I type the phrase, submit, "An error occured", post deleted. Damn you, Google. Chances are I will revive my blog somewhere else, sometime soon. I'll post the new coordinates here as soon as they become available. (BTW, I'm unable to post anything to my RSS stream, so I'd appreciate it if readers could spread the word and ask people to take a look at this notice)

Update (Oct 19/05, ~noon): After a frustrating few hours (and not just trying out alternatives to Blogger), I've decided that this is a good time to take a break from all this. A day? A week? Who knows. But I need to step away from it before I pass a heavy magnet over the whole mess.

Update 2: According to this post, the reason I'm seeing the CAPTCHA (challenge phrase) is that Blogger has classified my blog as spam. Thanks. User for five years and now I'm spam. I searched the Blogger site, but there is no mention of how to get the spam flag turned off. There is also no way of contacting anyone at Blogger. Wow. Spam they say I am, so spam I must be. Maybe it is time to take a break.

Tuesday, February 01, 2005

# Technorati: NewsTalk : Over the past month or so I've been using Technorati's NewsTalk page to see if it would provide a useful filtering of the news. The idea is that is ranks news items according to how much the news item is being talked about (linked to?) in the blogosphere.

To date, the results have been less then spectacular, basically the same items I see on the main pages of all the big news sites. Could it be that, as a whole, the blogosphere talks about what the media feeds us? Until these 'social' tools provide some way for users to define their own communities as something other then "everyone", their usefulness will be severly limited.

But that's not why I wrote this post. This morning, NewsTalk is feeding up the same generic list of news stories. Although this time, under the first five or six items is the following message:

There are no inbound links to this site from bloggers currently in our database.

WTF? So what exactly is this supposed to be doing? If no one is linking to the news item, how can it be the most talked about?

Oh, well. One less site to visit.

Comments:

Thanks for taking note, Dave.

I just emailed you some more comments on my part. I even added a technorati link to my sidebar!

# posted by

Quietloft : 10:16 AM