Social networking and social media

Over the last 30 years or so we’ve seen a tremendous increase in electronic communication by computer networking. Thirty years ago I mainly communicated with distant friends and family by snail mail. Now I mainly use email, if I have their email address. And there are social networking web sites like Facebook and Twitter where you can find friends and family even if you’ve lost touch with them.

But though the internet in general, and social networking sites in particular, make communication easier, the owners of the sites seem to go to great lengths to place obstacles in the way, so that the potential of the internet for communication is never fully realised. One of the most notorious examples was when Facebook, without telling its users, changed every user’s email address in its directory to a Facebook address, and hid mail sent to that address in a place where no one could find it.

I’d like to make some suggestions for improving the utility of social networking to the users. They probably won’t be tried, because there is a huge clash of interests, so Facebook is perpetually fighting its users in order to manipulate them and sell them, offering them the minimum of what they want in order to keep stringing them along.

Other social networking sites have been less successful at this. They start offering something that people find useful, and gain a lot of users. They then sell the site to a big company that announces that they are going to improve the site, and remove the very thing that attracted users in the first place. Yahoo! was notorious for buying up such sites and killing them — for example Geocities, BlogLog and WebRing.

When BlogLog went, there was another similar site called BlogCatalog, but they tried making “improvements” that crippled the main thing that attracted users.

Yet another was Technorati, which was a very useful tool for finding blog posts on similar subjects by means of tags. It also showed a list of trending topics in blog posts, some of which I did not understand at all, but curiosity made me investigate some of them, and so I leant something about popular culture, and the meaning of words like Beyonce, Pokemon and Paris Hilton (no, not the hotel, the daughter of its owner). And one of the things that trended was Twitter. I didn’t see much point in Twitter at first, but when Technorati abandoned its main function, Twitter became a less satisfactory substitute.

Whenever I link to a new blog from one of my WordPress blogs, there is a kind of social networking questionnaire. It’s an idea that’s been around for a long time, and I’ve filled in the information in the hope that someone will find a use for it one day. It’s called XFN, or the XHTML friends network, and you can read more about it here.

The rationale behind XFN’s categories of relationship is given here. While I don’t agree with all their decisions and categories, I think that it is a pretty good starting point, and that social networking sites like Facebook would be immensely improved if they instituted something like that.

In terms of XFN categories, all these are obviously “met”. But otherwise, from left to right — (1) friend kin colleague; (2) kin, friend; (3) me; (4) acquaintance (5) friend, colleague.

The only thing I would add for a site like Facebook would be the time dimension — the “met” category can mean last week or 40 years ago. I find Facebook most useful for contacting old friends and far-away friends.

But the use of categories like the XFN ones could enable Facebook to improve their algorithms of what they show to users. At the moment Facebook shows me lots of stuff from some people in the “contact” category, people I have never met.

Allowing users to categorise posts would also help. Some categories might be family news, general news, professional news, humour, trivia, etc. And possibly an importance rating — I don’t want to learn of a death in the family after the funeral has taken place (as happened in a couple of cases recently), while a new bird seen in the garden might be of less importance.

Does anyone else think any of this would be useful if implemented by Facebook or some other social networking sites?

Internet entropy

A couple of days ago our ADSL router was fried by lightning and we were offline for a couple of days until we could get and configure a new one. I wondered if we might be missing something important, but it turned out that we weren’t. What had piled up in our absence was not important communications, but a huge pile of “notifications” about utterly trivial things that were hardly communication at all.

There were notifications that several people had tweeted on Twitter, or that someone I didn’t know was following me on Twitter, or wanted to be my “friend” on Facebook. Eventually I’ll probably start getting notifications about notifications. Well actually they are already are, because Twitter itself is a notification.  This morning I deleted 144 spam comments on my other blogs most of them from something called “lista de emails”. There may have been some false positives there, but it’s too time-consuming even to scan the headings to see.

Web sites that were useful a few years ago have become less so. One of these is Technorati. It used to be useful for finding out what was going on in the blogosphere, and what people were blogging about. But no more. I already blogged about that about a year ago, see here Search Results Technorati | Notes from underground:

Back then it had stuff that interested me as a blogger. I could go there to find blogs and blog posts I was interested in. There used to be “Technorati tags”, and one could click on them to find who was blogging on what topics. If I was going to blog on a subject, I’d look up tags related to that subject, and if those blogs said anything interesting on the topic, I’d link to them.

Now, however, you can’t find stuff that you find interesting on Technorati. If you look at their tags page, for example, you can’t search for tags. They only show you the currently popular tags for the last month. Do not expect Technorati to give you what you like. You WILL like what Technorati gives you and tells you to like. There is a kind of arrogant authoritarian flavour to it.

I noticed that Technorati’s stats on some of my blogs had not been updated, including this one, so I checked to see why. It turned out that I didn’t have a full RSS feed turned on. In the interests of saving bandwidth, I had a partial feed, so that people could see the heading and first couple of paragraphs of of blog post. If they were interested, they could click on it and read the full thing. But Technorati wanted the full feed, even if no one reads it. So I turned it on. They responded with ” This site does not appear to be a blog or news site. Technorati does not support claiming of forums, product catalogs, and the like.”.

Well that’s nice to know. But I doubt that anyone is reading this non-blog anyway, so why am I writing this? No one will read it. No one will comment, except, perhaps, “lista de emails”

I looked at a friend’s Posterous blog the other day, and it had apparently been hijacked by someone posting fluff and incomprehensible garbage. Link-farms stuff.That’s why, when I moved this blog from Blogger, I did not delete the old one, and I disabled comments on it. Spammers love to post comments on abandoned blogs. Tip: If you get tired of an old blog, don’t delete it! If you delete it, the link farm people will move in and take over, enjoying all the traffic from old links, providing yet more junk to clog up the Internet.

I tried to post on my own Posterous blog, and it didn’t work. So I’ll probably abandon it. It has been taken over by Twitter, and lots of stuff doesn’t seem to work any more. My Tumblr blog used to provide an aggregate of my other blogs so it could be a place I could refer friends to who wanted to keep in touch. It also doesn’t work any more.

When Geocities stopped working, I moved my static web pages to Bravenet. But they’ve stopped working too. Go to one of my pages there and they just say that “This website is currently expired. If you have any questions, please contact technical support.” But there is no way of contacting “technical support”. None whatsoever.

So as a result there are a few thousand (or million) more dead links out on the Internet, where people say more and more about less and less. And actually it is not people saying it at all in most cases. It’s bots. The dormant predecessor of this blog at Blogspot still gets more readers than this one, though I ghaven’t updated it for months. And one of the biggest sources of traffic was a bot that told people how to get bots to write blog posts for them, so that they could make money from the web. I think that’s what may have happened with my friend’s Posterous blog. Snake oil, anyone?

Technorati claim code

I moved this blog from Blogger to WordPress three months ago. I thought I’d let Technorati know, and they said:

Technorati will need to verify that you are an author of the blog by looking for a unique code. Please put the following short code 5855T3M6ZVUB within a new blog post and publish it. This code must appear in the published post and it must also appear in your corresponding RSS feed once published.

So there’s the code they asked for.

 

 

The South Africa blogosphere, unravelled

Amatomu’s slogan used to be “The South African blogosphere, sorted.”

Well, now it has become unsorted, because Amatomu no longer seems to work. To “unravel” means to pull a knitted garment apart so that all you have is separate strands of wool, and you can no longer see the pattern or shape of the garment, or even the garment itself. It has gone.

And one by one the tools that I used to use to find interesting blogs have gone, or become unusable.

The first to go was Technorati. It’s still there, I think, but it’s no longer useful. It used to have tags that found blog posts with particular topic tags, but that no longer works. It’s become a thinly disguised advertising gimmick.

The next to go was Blog Catalog. That’s still there, but some whiz kid who had never heard of the old adage “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” decided to “improve” it. Now it no longer works.

Then it was the turn of MyBlogLog. Yahoo! bought it as a successful running concern from the original developers, and then pulled the plug on it. Yahoo! does that a lot. They did it with Geocities, they did it with Webrings, and they did it with MyBlogLog.

MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog were social blogrolling sites. They allowed each person to sort the blogosphere according to their own preference, but in such a way that others could see them and join in, the theory being that if you liked someone’s blog, you might like the blogs they liked, and the people who liked their blog might like yours. Since those two disappeared from the scene, I’ve lost contact with a whole bunch of blogs that I used to read, and I missed them. I found some again and put them in my blogroll, but that doesn’t tell me how often the writers of those blogs visit my blog, as MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog used to do.

But there was still Amatomu for South African blogs. You could see who had posted what recently, and which recent articles were most popular and so on. But now even that’s gone.

There’s still Afrigator, but I’ve never understood its user inferface, and no matter how much time I spend on it I never seem to find anything I’m looking for.

Occasionally someone comments on my blog, and I think, hey, I used to read your blog, but I haven’t seen it for a long time, and now I no longer know how to find it.

It’s all rather sad.

And when I say it’s sad people say, you must move on… move on to Facebook and imbibe popular culture and immerse yourself in banal and trivial stuff like “What my friends think I do, what my mom thinks I do, what my boss thinks I do” and so on.

Blogging’s better, but it’s getting harder to find the good blogs.

Carpenter’s Shoes: Fun with Technorati

I’ve just visited Technorati for the second time this month. and that’s probably also for the second time this year.

This time it was the result of reading Carpenter’s Shoes: Fun with Technorati

Technorati provide blog ranking stats (www.technorati.com) It’s a bit of a mission to find out the rankings of the South African religion blogs that I am interested in, but there are a few that I check once in a blue moon. Blog rankings are based on what Technorati calls authority.

My previous visit to Technorati this month was because I got an email asking me to take part in a survey on the state of the blogosphere. Though the survey wasn’t very satisfactory, if you are a blogger it might well be worth taking part in it, as the more who do so, the better the picture it will give of the state of the blogosphere, despite its flaws.

But Jenny Hillebrand’s post on Carpenter’s Shoes got me thinking about why I only visit Technorati once or twice a year, if that. A few years ago I used to visit the site three or four times a week.

What has changed?

Well the Technorati site has changed.

Back then it had stuff that interested me as a blogger. I could go there to find blogs and blog posts I was interested in. There used to be “Technorati tags”, and one could click on them to find who was blogging on what topics. If I was going to blog on a subject, I’d look up tags related to that subject, and if those blogs said anything interesting on the topic, I’d link to them.

Now, however, you can’t find stuff that you find interesting on Technorati. If you look at their tags page, for example, you can’t search for tags. They only show you the currently popular tags for the last month. Do not expect Technorati to give you what you like. You WILL like what Technorati gives you and tells you to like. There is a kind of arrogant authoritarian flavour to it.

What is going on here?

I suspect that Technorati was started by a bunch of bloggers who enjoyed blogging and tried to produce a tool that would be useful to bloggers and that bloggers would like. And it grew a bit beyond their capacity and they needed a bit of capital injection to keep it going and growing.

But capital injection also means that the marketing people come in and have more say, and in their philosophy giving bloggers what they are looking for is no good at all. What is important is to steer bloggers towards the stuff that brings in the most advertising revenue for us.

So they modify it, and tell you:

Welcome to the
new Technorati.com

The blogosphere evolves and so do we.

And that means they make it harder to find what you are looking for, and easier to find the stuff that brings in the most advertising revenue for them. And finding what you are looking for, as Jenny says, is “a bit of a mission.”

And that is why I now visit Technorati only once or twice a year, instead of three or four times a week.

Blogging blind

With the death of Amatomu and Technorati, I feel a great lack in the blogosphere.

Both seem to have died from the same cause — someone decided to tinker with them to make “improvements”, and broke whatever was working before. There’s a lot of truth in the old saying “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Amatomu used to be a fairly good guide to South African blogs. You could see who was blogging about what, and the latest posts in various categories. It also gave fairly interesting statistics on one’s own blog, showing which posts got the most readers and things like that.

Now I suddenly find that there are blogs that I used to follow fairly regularly that I haven’t looked at for a month or more, because Amatomu is dead. It appears that the Mail & Guardian, which used to run it, has pulled out, and are looking to sell it or give it away.

Technorati was good for topical searches. I used to use it to see who was blogging on a certain topic, and to see what they said. I liked to do that when I was planning to write a blog post on a topic, and if I found that other bloggers had already said interesting things on the topic, i could link to there posts as well. But now it’s as though one is blogging blind, not knowing who else is writing on the topic, and whether anyone has some interesting angles one hadn’t thought of.

I suppose that has now been taken over by Google blog search, because when one goes to Technorati for the last few weeks all one gets is messages like

Welcome to the new Technorati.com! The page requested was not found. It’s possible you reached this page because we forgot to update a link on the previous version of our site. We have recorded this event and will be doing our best to repair any broken links.

Well the links have been broken for so long that there is no longer any hope thatr they will be repaired.

I suppose Amatomu is the victim of a common problem in the IT industry — people who have a good idea and implement it where they are working, and then move on to somewhere else, leaving the Mail & Guardian (in this case) stuck with a service that no one else really knows how to maintain. I rather hope that the community option comes off, and that the original authors may see fit to revive it.

The heat death of the Internet

A couple of days ago I commented on entropy on the Internet, and things are getting worse. Amatomu is still broken. Technorati returns “Page not found”. I’m thinking of removing their widgets/links from my blog, since they no longer serve any purpose.

And last weekend my ISP, Telkom, announced that there would be service interruptions over the weekend so that they could improve their service, and the service interruptions have continued ever since. The service seems to work for 30 seconds, and then to be off for two minutes, in a continuing cycle. Two out of three web pages I click on return the following message:

Network Timeout

The operation timed out when attempting to contact groups.yahoo.com.

The requested site did not respond to a connection request and the browser has stopped waiting for a reply.

Is it just me, or are any other Telkom subscribers experiencing similar problems?

Entropy in the blogosphere

Why is it that websites that provide auxiliary services to blogs have a passion to tinker with their sites in such a way that what used to work no longer works, and adding a whole lot of useless stuff?

I’m not the only one to have noticed this. St. Aidan to Abbey Manor: What’s going on with Technorati?:

Not that I notice these things, but in the past week my Technorati ‘authority’ (number of other sites linking here in the last 90 days) has dropped like a stone, and my ranking seems to vary by several hundred thousand depending on which way the wind is blowing at the time. Maybe they’re all getting a bit overloaded. It looks like links from the sidebars of other blogs (like the ones down the right hand side here) aren’t being counted any more.

Technorati is a prime example of people messing with something that previously worked well so that when they have fixed it it doesn’t work at all. When I first joined Technorati I found it quite useful, but it has become more and more erratic.

If I’m blogging on a topic, I sometimes enter key words in Technorati to see what other people are saying about it, but now I find Google blog search is much more reliable for that. Technorati keep changing their user interface and moving stuff around so it is far more difficult to find. I used to be able to go to my home page on Technorati, see all my blogs, ping them if necessary, see who had linked to my blog posts, and see the top ten search keywords and the top ten post key words. That’s how I learnt about Twitter, and discovered who Paris Hilton and Steven Furtick were.

But those have all been scattered and are no longer conveniently visible in one place. I suspect that the reason for that is that Techorati hope that you will go looking for them as in a labyrinth, going down numerous dead ends and having to work your way back, and so will be exposed to more advertisements and so they will make more money. That might work for a week, but after that most people will give up and stop visiting the site.

The home page was all over Technology Business Entertainment Lifestyle Politics Sports Gaming Celebrity. One of the reasons I never visited Digg was that most of my interests didn’t fit into any of those categories, and when Technorati went down that route I lost interest.

After writing this I went to have a look at their home page (for the first time in about six months) and I see they’ve put back a little of what used to be there, but still not enough.

And I just did a test: I searched for “hippocracy”, and none of my posts on that topic show up in Technorati, even though they have explicit Technorati tags. When I click on the tag in the post itself it takes me to the relevant tag page on Technorati, which tells me that “there are no posts related to this tag”. And it also goes on to say

Welcome to the hippocracy tag page at Technorati. This page features content from the farthest reaches of the Blogosphere that authors have “tagged” with hippocracy.

Yet it can’t even find the post that has the tag that I clicked on to reach the page — so much for the “farthest reaches of the Blogosphere” claim. The fact is that it doesn’t work. It’s broken.

Even the WordPress page on the topic appears to be broken (or hacked).

So Technorati is pretty useless.

Another site that seems to have similar problems is Amatomu. When it started, Amatomu was a fairly good guide to the South African blogosphere, and also gave some interesting statistics about what posts on one’s blog were being read most frequently.

By far the most popular post on this blog was Notes from underground: Books to read before you die. But then Amatomu revamped their software, and suddenly it appeared that no one was reading it at all. So either the Amatomu statistics were wildly wrong before, or they are wildly wrong now. I suspect that it is the “improvements” that broke it. One of my widgets tells me that Saint John, New Brunswick arrived on “Notes from underground: Books to read before you die” today, so people are still reading that post, and it is the Amatomu statistics that are as inaccurate as Technorati’s.

After the bad news, some good news: Blog Explosion seems to be improving.

Like Technorati and Amatomu, Blog Explosion was started by enthusiastic people who lost interest in it and handed over the running of it to someone else who didn’t really grasp the original vision. Because of entropy, without enthusiastic input, it gradually ran down. But in the case of Blog Explosion the users organised themselves, and complained, pressed and prodded until the people running Blog Explosion finally acted to arrest the decline, and began to get things working properly again.

They were able to do this because of the way Blog Explosion works.

At one level it is a kind of Blog Directory, with blogs divided into various categories. You surf through blogs, which it is supposed to show you in random order, giving preference to a category that you choose. As you surf, you get points for each blog you see, and your blog is then shown to other surfers in proportion to the number of points you earn. So it is a good way of seeing new blogs, and getting new readers for your blog at the same time.

The problem was that because lack of maintenance and general neglect, it was shaowing the same blogs over and over, even if they hadn’t been updated for months, also also was not showing blogs in the chosen categories, but in categories that were of no interest.

Blog Explosion users got fed up with this, so they blogged about it, and because of the way Blog Explosion works, other users saw these posts, commented on them, and blogged about it in turn. And eventually Blog Explosion users got sufficiently fired up to nag the owners of Blog Explosion to do something about it. So they removed some of the dead wood — neglected blogs that weren’t updated — and did some general cleanups, which led to a great improvement.

One of the things about Blog Explosion is the more the merrier — the more bloggers who participate, the greater the number of new blog posts there are to see, ones you might never have otherwise seen. So I encourage bloggers to participate in this.

There are still some improvements that could be made, but it’s definitely better than it was a few months ago, unlike Technorati, where they keep changing the user interface and making the site more difficult to navigate while the underlying purpose and the functions it was supposed to provide are no longer there — like finding blog posts tagged “hippocracy” (or anything else).

Finding good blogs to read

I saw this appeal on another blog.

Suggestions, please! The Ultra, the Fabulous, the only, Miss P!:

I’m running out of good blogs to read.
Any suggestions?

I can understand and sympathise.

I used to use Blog Explosion when I was bored and looking for blogs to read. You could give it your favourite topic (mine was “Books/Literature/Witing”) and it would show you random blogs dealing with that topic, and when it ran out of ones on that topic it would start showing you ones on other topics. By looking at other blogs you earned “points” which meant that your blog(s) were shown to other similarly bored people.

It was quite a good idea when it started, but apparently like so many things in the blogosphere (remember Amatomu and Geocities), it was abandoned by the originators of the idea, taken over by someone else who was simply interested in making money out of it, and then neglected, and allowed to run down.

Now Blog Explosion no longer shows blogs that are related to your preferred topic, but shows the same old off-topic ones over and over again — I suspect because they have paid for preferred positions. The trouble is that some of those that keep getting shown first haven’t been updated, so it becomes even more boring. I occasionally look at it in the hope that things will improve, but they don’t. Perhaps the problem is that there are not enough new people registerin g blogs there, so they are showing the same old repertoire over and over again. So if you are reading this, perhaps you should try it. Register your blog at Blog Explosion, and have a look at what it shows you. Much of it will probably be new and fresh the first time round. If you find too much repetition, there’s no need to go back, but at least your blog will provide a new option for some of the users who have seen it all.

Another way is to look at the blogs in the blogroll of blogs you find interesting. Use a social blogrolling tool like BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog to mark ones that look interesting and possibly worth a return visit.

For South African blogs Amatomu still works, though suffering somewhat from neglect by its sponsors. It also went downhill when, in addition to listing blogs, it listed blog hosts, so that half the blogs one sees there are called “Blat: to utter without thinking” or “Thought Leader”, when in fact those are hosts to many different blogs. It needs someone enthusiastic to take over and do a radical clean-up and reorganisation to get back to the original idea that worked well.

Afrigator used to work OK, but has now become JASNS (Just Another Social Networking Site).

When I first started blogging I used to use Technorati a lot, but that too has gone downhill. It used to be possible to use tag searches to find stuff you were interested in, and each registered user had a page that showed their blogs, and what tags were popular at the moment, but that has now gone, and like Blog Explosion they’ve rearranged their user interface to make it more difficult to use. I suspect that this is in order to make you hunt in many more pages to find what you are looking for, so that you will be exposed to more advertising and make more money for them as you go down each dead end. Surely they must realise that this is counter-productive — it might bring a short-term rise in advertising revenue, but eventually people users will be annoyed and go elsewhere. At the moment they seem to have a lot of technical problems, so even their new and disimproved and dehanced and clunkier user interface doesn’t work properly.

So to the one and only Miss P. my best suggestion, at the moment, is Google Blog Search.

Any other suggestions?

Stuff that doesn’t work

It seems that I’m not the only one finding problems with Technorati (see Notes from underground: Ping Technorati, Ping Technorati).

Anali’s First Amendment: Ping Me Please!:

I’ve been trying to get Technorati to ping my blog for 18 days now and it still won’t do it.

Apparently this has been a problem for many people, since PING is a huge topic in their support section. Hopefully they’ll fix this soon.

For this blog, the Technorati site shows:

Notes from underground Last Pinged 25 days ago

and another blog (updated yesterday)

Khanya Last Pinged 11 days ago

And for some of my other blogs it’s been even longer.

And if the problem is as widespread as it seems to be, then it means that other sites that use Technorati rankings and “authority”, like Amatomu, are relying on incomplete and inaccurate data when they rank South African blogs according to their Technorati rank.

1	Adii Freelancer & Business Strategist | by adii ranked 1288 on Technorati
2	Marco’s Blog | by marcog ranked 5831 on Technorati
3	Ninja Monkeys! | by Vaughn ranked 14926 on Technorati
4	Online Reputation Management | by ViperChill ranked 19454 on Technorati
5	AfriGadget | by hash ranked 20878 on Technorati
6	Cape Town Daily Photo | by kerryanne ranked 25556 on Technorati
7	SA Rocks | by nicharry ranked 28099 on Technorati
8	Vinny Lingham’s Blog | by Vinny Lingham ranked 28411 on Technorati
9	Cherryflava | by Cherryflava ranked 30835 on Technorati
10	Web AddiCT(s); | by rafiq ranked 35747 on Technorati
11	The Vegan Diet | by Vegan ranked 37082 on Technorati
12	So Close | by Tertia ranked 38755 on Technorati
13	Skinny laMinx | by Heather Moore ranked 40190 on Technorati
14	Nic Haralambous Writes | by nicharry ranked 41404 on Technorati
15	iMod – Anything & Everything Web | by Chris M ranked 43057 on Technorati
16	Affiliate Lounge | by dreampunchboy ranked 44457 on Technorati
17	Mike Stopforth | by mikestopforth ranked 47546 on Technorati
18	Architectradure | by cati ranked 47970 on Technorati
19	Eric Edelstein | by Eric ranked 51581 on Technorati
20	iScatterlings | by iScatterlings ranked 56528 on Technorati
21	Khanya | by SteveH ranked 56528 on Technorati
22	Wozafriday | by Ddavef ranked 60261 on Technorati
23	Hunter of Genius | by MaxKaizen ranked 61585 on Technorati
24	SprayGlue | by SprayGlue ranked 61585 on Technorati
25	bloute | by sparrows ranked 64717 on Technorati

The Technorati people are forever fiddling with their pages “look and feel”, which makes stuff more difficult to find. If only they put as much effort into fixing the basic functionality, to make things work.

I don’t know about other people, but I usually look at Technorati to see what’s going on in the blogosphere right now.

Yesterday, for example, I wanted to see who was blogging about Helen Suzman, who died on New Year’s day. No one, according to Amatomu (Search for “+helen +suzman “ returned 0 results). No point in looking at Technorati, because posts about a January death will only appear there 3-4 weeks later to judge by the ping rate. So in the absence of any posts on the topic, I wrote one on In Memoriam: Helen Suzman.

But of course I should have looked here. That would have told me who was blogging about Helen Suzman now instead of having to wait a month or two for Technorati to catch up.

It’s no use for Technorati to play with the bells and whistles. If the piston isn’t connected to the wheels because the connecting rod is missing, that engine ain’t going anywhere.