Housekeeping: Technorati Problems

I’ve noticed a problem with new Plagiarism Today entries not appearing on Technorati. In fact, if you visit this link, you can see that Technorati claims PT was last update nine days ago, despite regular postings over the past week.

At first I thought that the problem was due to my recent upgrade to Wordpress 2.0, but I checked the last entries indexed and two were accepted after the upgrade. I also tried removing various Feedburner features from the site and the RSS feed to no avail.

I did some searching on the problem and I appear to be in good company. Many bloggers, including Darren from problogger.net, are battling this problem and appear to be unable to lick it. The only advice I found was to check the site for XHTML compliance. While the site failed miserably, all of the errors were minor and none affected the stories. In the end, fixing all of the errors I could produced no result.

In the end, the only likely outcome seems to be either Technorati fixing the problem on their end or advising me on what I can do on mine. I’ve sent an email to their tech staff but, after reading several other posts on the subject, am not optimistic about getting a reply.

The good news is that this does not appear to be affecting Icerocket and most other blog search engines. The exception is Google Blog Search, which doesn’t appear to have a new post from this site for a long time.

If anyone has any advice on this matter, I’d love to hear it. Though Technorati has never been a major source of traffic for PT, I’d like for the entries to be searchable again.

Plagiarism Today on BlogBurst

Finally, Plagiarism Today was recently invited to join BlogBurst, a service by Pluck, that aides bloggers who want to allow reuse of their content meet up with interested, high-grade publishers. In that regard, it works very much like the Creative Commons Search, but is both more exclusive in nature and is targeted at bloggers and article writers.

It is definitely an honor to be selected for this and I’m excited about the possibilities. Still, as someone who is constantly on the lookout for plagiarism, I do see the dangers with this service and am viewing this as a trial run.

I’ll be very excited to report my findings on the matter when I learn more.

(Note: If all goes well, I’m doing a second post today, the regular Tuesday wrap up, expect the expected news article to appear Wednseday as new information has come to light that must be considered)

ESBN 95041-060221-867546-65
[tags]Plagiarism, Technorati, Blogburst, Pluck, Content Theft, Copyright Infringement[/tags]