My technorati daily experience, illustrated

Following my earlier post on Technorati, here is a typical egorati(*) journey there, with snapshots.

More often than not, I get an error, today's is business (or lack thereof) as usual (note that if the site is too busy, why does it tell me so after one minute and not upfront?):

Evidence 1: we're too busy. Unavailable

So I pick the recommended choice to add this as a watchlist. After one or two minutes of watching the spinning Technorati logo (I like it, very much inspired from the Apple spinning circle used as a waiting sign all over Mac OS X), I eventually get these two results:

Evidence 2: Watchlist, 2 results, slooooowly.

Then I add the RSS feed of this search to my aggregator, and I get this:

Evidence 3: Watchlist RSS, 1 result, not the same as the web search. Unreliable.

Only one result, completely different from the two results for the same search displayed on the web site. Tell me about the index accuracy.

Now that Trackback has been killed by spammers, one could hope to be able to follow conversations through services like Technorati (which provides a nice API to do just that). However, we see that it's far from being comprehensive and accurate. That might explain why Jeremy has to pile up three competing services to do that: Technorati, Feedster and Bloglines (he had a fourth one, Yahoo! Links or something like that in the past, but I don't see it now). But this is tedious and requires many clicks for the visitor to follow the conversation. I would love to have a way to see the conversation -- whether from comments, Trackbacks, whatever links back to a specific post -- without the visitor having to click through all those strange names. Frankly, between "conversation" and "Trackback/Technorati/Feedster/Bloglines/", what do you think speaks to the casual visitor?

P.S. for the sake of ironic transparency, I'm posting this on a server that keeps going up and down. But, heck, I don't have a hundred dedicated servers to power my site :-).

(*) Can you tell I'm a slightly addicted blogger?

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