Infotropism Kirrily Robert’s blog

Technorati and Perl

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Over at use.perl, Schwern’s been talking about Perl blogs and their visibility.

There are hundreds(?) of journals over on use.perl, but if you google for Perl blogs you won’t find any of them easily. In fact, you won’t find much of anything at all. Meanwhile, googling for Ruby blogs will give you an entirely different picture.

It’s things like this that lead people to claim that Perl is dead, when the converse is manifestly true. Thing is, a lot of the conversations about Perl are happening in walled — or at least lightly fenced — gardens that are not very visible to the rest of the web.

So, let’s fix that.

Telling Technorati about your journal

Schwern discovered that Technorati — one of the biggest and best-known blog search engines — doesn’t index use.perl journals by default. If you want it to know about yours, you have to register.

1. Sign up for an account on Technorati
2. “Claim blog”, and give them your use.perl journal URL, eg. http://use.perl.org/~skud/journal
3. Post the provided link in your use.perl journal in your user profile — the link doesn’t need to be in a post, just somewhere on your journal page, and this will prevent it spamming readers.
4. Click the button back on Technorati to let them know you’ve done it.

You’ll now see that your journal exists in Technorati. It might even have some “reactions” logged already — more on that later. One downside: the title will be something like “Journal of Skud (28)” and there’s nothing you can do about that; it takes the title from the journal itself, and use.perl doesn’t let you change it.

Technorati juice

Technorati gives each journal an “authority” score and a “rank”.

Authority is based on how many unique blogs have linked to yours in the last 6 months, as a simple integer. Sometimes this is described as “42 reactions to this blog” on the Technorati site. If you click on the green authority link, you’ll see a list of reactions to your blog. It can be interesting to explore them and see who’s been linking to you.

Of course, Technorati doesn’t know about reactions unless it’s also tracking the blogs that are reacting to you. Since use.perl journals tend to interlink a lot, this is one reason why it’s a good idea for as many use.perl people as possible to get onto Technorati: it’ll cause the links to be noticed, and gain greater “authority” for Perl journals.

Technorati Rank is basically an ordinal number derived from authority. If you line up all the blogs in order of authority, the first on the list has a Technorati Rank of 1, and so on. This blog, Infotropism, currently has a Technorati authority of 44 and a rank of 137,515.

A case study

For interest’s sake, let’s take a look at Schwern’s use.perl journal. Right now, it appears to have a rank of 2:

If we click through to the authority page, via “Authority: 2″, we actually see more reactions than that:

14 reactions. Why the discrepancy? Well, Technorati sometimes takes a while to update the authority score, and those extra 12 posts are most likely ones that Technorati learnt about just because Schwern, and other use.perl journalists, started using Technorati.

Why do we care?

Meh, Technorati, so what? Many would contend that the entire “blogosphere” is a self-absorbed wankfest, and that obsessing over Technorati rank is one of the worst symptoms of the problem. And they may well be right.

The thing is, Technorati rank both reflects and causes higher visibility for a blog. More visibility means more Google juice. And more Google juice means — hopefully — that when people search for “Perl blogs” they might actually find some. I think this is a thing worth attempting.

What else can we do?

The mainstream blogging platforms — Wordpress, Movable Type, Blogger, etc — have features which help contribute to blog visibility on Technorati, Google, etc. These include:

• Pings — When you post to your blog, it automatically pings Technorati and other services to let them know your blog’s updated, thus triggering a re-indexing
• Trackbacks — When someone else links to one of your posts, they ping your blog to let you know. This helps you follow conversations across multiple sites, and provides some two-way linkage to help out the search engines.
• Blogrolls — a list of your favourite blogs, or related blogs, in a sidebar; Technorati counts blogroll links towards Authority
• Tags — tagging your posts makes them easier to find in Technorati’s search engine. For instance see posts tagged with perl.

If we could get some of these going on use.perl — which uses slashcode — then we’d really be in business. That’s a whole project in itself, but it’s worth considering.

Another thing to do might be to start talking to each other more in your blogs: links feed both Google and readers into the community. Respond to each other’s posts, etc etc. Planet Perl and syndicating your blogs to Advogato (which can now suck in RSS feeds) might help you all read each other regularly.

Unless everyone is following use.perl journals I guess…

Mary: I think just about everyone’s using use.perl journals; that’s the point. If you look at Planet Perl’s feeds in the sidebar, you’ll see they’re almost all use.perl.org journals, and when I went looking for other ones, this is all I found: List of Perl blogs.

Mary: Oh, and yeah, people interlink quite a bit between use.perl blogs, I think. Though not as much as, say, Livejournal. Speaking of which, have you seen this article and accompanying image with Livejournal as a glow in the upper right corner? (Google search phrase: “links between blogs livejournal in the corner”, ha.)

More visibility means more Google juice.

use Perl as a whole already has a rather high PageRank.

And more Google juice means — hopefully — that when people search for “Perl blogs” they might actually find some.

If you search for “Perl journals”, the use Perl journals page comes up as first hit.

Here’s a much bigger problem than the fact that Technorati doesn’t index use Perl journals: check out the page titles at use Perl. They’re basically worthless, almost every single one of them. Journal entries do not include the entry title in the page title, whereas the comments of an entry (illogically enough) do include it but do not include the subject of the comment itself.

As far as regular search engines are concerned, page titles and the words in the URI are extremely valuable. This is in fact so important that I added extra machinery to my main weblog so I can give people coming from Google the right leads.

Not that I disagree with the premise, mind; I just think there’s much more to do than just get the use Perl crowd to sign up with Technorati. A big part of the “problem,” in my opinion, is that in teams of peak hype, Perl dates back to an era where most of the conversation happened off the web – on mailing lists and Usenet. (Cf. Perl Monks being the most unusual kind of messageboard I ever saw anywhere; it’s much more like Usenet groups than it is like web fora.) This has imprinted on Perl culture; the movers and shakers in Perl generally don’t keep high-profile weblogs. It’s p5p, clpm, and to some extent IRC. The only exception I can think of off the top of my head would be Dan Sugalski, back when he was head of Parrot.

Aristotle: correct on all points. I’m a bit bleh about use.perl (which is why I tend to make my blog posts here and then crosslink from there, rather than writing them there in the first place) but OTOH it has been around for ages and provided a useful service when first set up. The problem is that it just hasn’t moved with the times. And from what I hear, slashcode is sufficiently awful that trying to hack in even nice journal titles, let alone something like trackbacks, is more than I want to deal with.

I have some other plans simmering away… you can be sure I’ll post about them if/when they move towards being anything more than random ideas.

Sounds good to me.

Me, I actually like use.Perl for the most part – I wish the HTML sanitiser was a tad more permissive but at the same time I appreciate the resulting minimalism. (Some of its aspects are really crappy, granted – the page titles are one example.) The interface doesn’t get in my way either.

What really really matters, though, is that it serves as a central place to find the weblogging Perl community. I see everything that gets posted there (and I read about 92% of it): if you’re on use.Perl, you’re on my radar. If you’re not, I might subscribe you or might not – that bar is much higher. And there are many like me. (This comes up every time someone posts another “hey folks I’ll be blogging over there now”.)

So I think use.Perl continues to provide an important service; anything new that addresses the same space really needs to enjoy the same community support that use.Perl has had, IMO.

I don’t know that the other dynamic languages have anything like that (although that may just be ignorance on my part). Assuming they don’t, it is just another example of how the communication in the Perl community is tighter-knit than elsewhere – but unfortunately also yet another example of how that isn’t very visible to the rest of the world.

Can we keep the good things about use.Perl while addressing its shortcomings? (Would your plan, maybe?) That would do a lot of good, I think.

(PS.: it would be nice if the “get notified” checkbox remembered that I checked it when previewing.)

Aristotle: I think you’ve hit the nail on the head wrt the community aspects. use.perl really is good for people already in the Perl community to find each other easily. But the key word there is “already”. We’re talking about a small crowd of regulars, most of whom mostly talk amongst themselves.

Since starting the Perl Survey I’m really starting to see how little that “in crowd” has to do with the full set of Perl programmers out there: both because so many of the non-regulars have responded to the survey, and also because I’ve had so many comments saying “Wow, people still use Perl?” If the Perl folks are all over on use.perl talking to each other and not being visible to the rest of the world, it’s a nice cosy little environment for those few people but I think it’s bad for Perl on the whole.

Not that cosy environments are a bad thing btw! I would just like to see a few features to make use.perl.org more visible/well known, and also see us promote the other options that are out there, rather than centralising quite so much.

And well, now we know what you and Andy were in the process of setting up…

Aristotle: that’s just one of the things, actually I have many, many plans! I’m taking notes at http://infotrope.net/wiki/perl_blog_master_plan

Ah, I see that you independently came up with an almost verbatim copy of my own ideas! Fools seldom differ, I guess.