Technorati v. The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem: The Final Showdown

There’s been a lot of talk about “The Truth Laid Bear” ecosystem as it changes its rankings to make it more complex with the intention of stopping people doing unfair things that endanger the sanctity of the Bear’s rankings.

Meanwhile, Open Trackbackers and others are either turning away from rankings altogether or towards Technorati Rankings. What are Technorati rankings and does it differ from “The Truth Laid Bear” rankings. To answer that question, lets go a little deeper in comparing the systems.

A High Technorati Ranking Gets You:

A number ranking. (Mine is 8,984 which doesn’t sound impressive, but read on.)

A High Truth Laid Bear Ranking Gets You:

A number ranking (mine is 951) and a cute animal nickname. (Marauding Marsupial.)

Advantage: Truth Laid Bear

How They Do Rankings:

In their own words:

Technorati:

A Technorati Ranking relates to the number of sources that point to a particular weblog relative to other weblogs. The more sources referencing a weblog, the higher the Technorati ranking. To see the Technorati Ranking for your own blog, you need to become a Technorati member and claim your weblog.

Truth Laid Bear:

The TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem is an application which scans weblogs and generates a list of weblogs ranked by the number of incoming links they receive from other weblogs on the list…

(Links counted):

All links from a scanned weblog to any other weblog (i.e., links from a weblog to itself are ignored). This includes links within posts, and ‘permanent’ links in a weblog’s blogroll.

(How About Links Not on the Front Page)

No, only the front page.

Commentary:

Technorati counts every link from another blog, be it in the inline Trackbacks or buried in another section of the blog somewhere, Technorati counts the link. Truth Laid Bear counts front page links (excluding inline trackbacks.) This is a key difference between the systems. Technorati is also a powerful search engine that monitors blogs.

To me, its a plus. If you buy the idea that getting links is what makes a blog successful (and I don’t buy that completely), then it makes sense to count every link because the more links you have, the greater the opportunity you have of getting people to click on them. The Bear’s school countenances the front page link. It doesn’t state a reason, but I’ll extrapolate. Something that’s on the Front Page may have a greater chance of getting clicked on than a Trackback in a post or something that’s never sees the light of the frontpage.

I disagree, because link value is really relative. I’ve got 170+ hits from Don Surber, most of them from Trackback parties. I’ve gotten around 50 hits from the Political Teen. On numerous pages, I’m in the Blog Roll and have gotten no hits or very few. So which is an actual effective link? We don’t know. I say count all the links and let God sort it out.

Advantage: Technorati

Who Is Ranked:

Technorati:
As indicated above, everyone has a Technorati ranking. Whether its known or public is another matter. You actually have to join to find out or to have the number become public information.

I just added a blog that I used in the 2004 State Legislative campaign, and the only link to it is on this blog. Its ranked 985,568 right now, so that means that this blog is in the top 1% of Technorati rankings. (See I told you that was impressive.)

The Truth Laid Bear:

There are less than 45,000 “blogs” in the TTLB ecosystem. Understand that TTLB is a self-selected group of bloggers, focusing mostly on a narrow theme. TTLB is dominated by politics and bloggers supporting or attacking religion. There are few gadget blogs, or few of most other types of Blogs that appear in the TTLB higher echelon. The reason for that is obvious. If there are few Business blogs in TTLB and you join TTLB, all you get for it is being able to see:

Bob’s Business Blog
is a Lowly Insect in the TTLB ecosystem

Every day you load up your blog.

This is why I didn’t put the code on there when my rankings were lower. A blogger has enough problems without self-inflicted wounds to his ego.

So, basically with TTLB rankings, you’re up against a small group while with Technorati, you face all the blogs on Earth. In addition, Truth Laid Bear has a lot of “blogs” listed that are nothing of the sort. The best recent news is that they finally got the Drudge Report out of the ecosystem. This is good as Drudge is not a blog, let alone the 8th greatest blog on Earth as it was ranked recently.

However, there are other that clearly don’t belong because a ranking of blogs should, and maybe I’m being a tad rough here, should include only BLOGS. I’m a Freeper of 5 years but Free Republic is NOT a blog, Moveon.org is not a blog, neither is Human Events. That is a weekly newspaper. I’m waiting for a joker to add the Washington Post to the TTLB ecosystem and watch the world collapse.

Both have got common problems. There are the Dead blogs that have one post from December of 2003 that goes something like this:

Hey, I had an idea. I’ll start a blog. I’ll post all of my important thoughts here.

And then utter silence follows for all eternity, proving that people without important thoughts shouldn’t blog. There are, of course spam blogs in both systems. I like the comprehensive nature of Technorati and the fact that blogs are ranked rather than the Detroit Free Press,

Advantage: Technorati

How they publish Rankings:

Technorati:

With Technorati, you can view the top 100 blogs in their rankings. However, beyond that it becomes a crapshoot of whether the Blog has actually been registered and claimed by a Technorati member as to whether you can find its numerical ranking.

Truth Laid Bear:

This is where Truth Laid Bear shines. It lists ALL 43,000 + blogs and ranks them from top to bottom. They’re also nicely grouped by animal. This is great for bloggers so they can find out whose ranked similarly to them. TTLB has also introduced Ecotraffic which allows you to see how the blogs in the ecosystem—that agree to share their traffic (which makes up about 10-11% of the total blogs) rank. Its a good research tool to see how well links correlate with traffic.

Advantage: Truth Laid Bear.

So, Technorati has the advantage in 3 categories and TTLB has the advantage in 2. I think Technorati is better as a blogging tool, but the TTLB ecosystem has its place. I don’t plan on dumping either, but my Technorati ranking tells me more about how my blog’s progressing.

The main advantage of TTLB are the fun animals and being able to see how much traffic other sites get compared to my own. Use both and have fun.

Don Surber
Pursuing Holiness
Bright and Early
The Political Teen
California Conservative
Is It Just Me
Third World County

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Truth Laid Bear, Technorati