How to delete your Tumblr tumblelog with TumblrCleanr
Tumblr is rapidly becoming my favorite free blogging platform (more so than Blogger/WordPress.com) because of all the things they do correct:
- RSS feed importing (up to 5)
- free domain name support
- free CSS/theme support
- Google Analytics support
- javascript widget support
- keeping it simple
(You can read more about Tumblr’s Pro and Cons in this post I wrote for Lorelle on WordPress)
However, there’s one feature that’s missing: how do you delete your Tumblr? At some point you might want to destroy all traces of your tumblr (privacy concerns, or you want to use it for something else) and there isn’t an option to do that — other than click the delete button on every individual post. I wanted to repurpose a tumblr I had been using for feed aggregation and it had over 18,000 posts. That’s a lot of clicks.
Enter the TumblrCleanr. Provide it with your tumblr domain name as well as your username and password and it will delete up to the latest 3000 posts at a time. You can keep running it until your entire tumblr is clean as a whistle.
This script will DELETE ALL POSTS ON YOUR TUMBLR WITH NO BACKUPS. If that isn’t what you want to do then please don’t use it. :)
Opting Out of Technorati – The Break-up
Dear Technorati,
I’m writing to say goodbye. With time I hope I’ll have more good things to say than bad, but this hasn’t been the case of late. I know you have plenty of other suitors paying attention to you, and I doubt you’ll even miss me. But I thought I’d write you a note to explain my absence and what went wrong between us.
I’ve decided to follow in the footsteps of Jason Kottke (from 2005) and stop calling you. It was fun watching my rank improve until I was in the top percentile of your favorite people, but I’ll never be one of the top one hundred you lavish your attention on… so why am I bothering? One of the key principles of time management is to put your attention and focus on what gets the maximum return on investment, but you haven’t been giving me anything more than a number and a lot of frustration.
Technorati, I fully appreciate the magnitude of what you’re doing with only a 45 person team behind you. I think focusing on search makes sense because you’ve already wasted too much time courting bloggers for links. Bloggers truly are such a limited part of the all the people who could be using you. We’re also fair weather friends who are the first to turn on you and complain when things go wrong.
But I’m leaving you Technorati, and I have the following grievances that you don’t seem to care about. I’m glad you’ve shed some pounds, and your dressing better, but looks aren’t everything. It’s the way you treat me that matters in the end.
Problems I’ve had with Technorati
- You lost the last month of my blog posts even though they were pinged and indexed before your new cosmetic changes. Because I only show the very latest blog post on my front page you’ll never find them again, even though the last 40 entries are all nicely showing up with full text in my RSS feed. Why don’t your spiders use my RSS feed? This is not the first time we’ve had this problem.
- You are inflexible when it comes to my blog URL. My latest posts must appear on https://engtech.wordpress.com, and your spiders will become confused if I ever change it to something like engtech.wordpress.com/blog. I can go from …com/blog to …com but not the other way around.
- My Technorati favorites page does not show the latest posts from ALL my 500 favorites – only a small subset of them. It is much better for me to track them with Google Reader or to use a Google Custom Search engine then to use Technorati favorites.
- The Technorati API should be a great way to grab information about blogs, but if you are under high traffic you will often fail to return any data at all instead of a standard error.
- You ask for entirely too many links back. I’m supposed to tag my posts with links back to you and add big “favorite my blog on Technorati” links on every page of my site in the hopes I can climb the top 100 favorites list, which no one really uses anyways.
- You do nothing to fix the long standing ping bug where anyone can ping a permalink post on a blog and have it show up as a new blog. I have to log a support ticket whenever I want to fix this.
- You cannot handle domain changes. It is very common for bloggers to start out on *.blogspot.com or *.wordpress.com and then eventually buy their own domain name. Every other search engine understands the 301 redirect just fine, why can’t you? This is by far your biggest limitation.
This isn’t to say you don’t have good people working for you. I’ve seen you help out friends and send them free t-shirts. I fully appreciate how difficult bloggers are to deal with, and how big of an achievement indexing that many blogs is. I appreciate all of the times you’ve gone out of your way to contact people who are having problems.
But there’s no denying that I’m having a very bad user experience with Technorati. Instead of being able to use you how I want, I’m pigeon-holed into trying to get you to display my blog properly and track the other blogs who are linking to it. All for what… a few meaningless numbers?
Technorati Rank got a lot of attention before it was replaced with Technorati Authority, but it can easily be deep-sixed. Google has bought FeedBurner and can combine the data from FeedBurner subscription counts and Google Reader. While you were busy determining authority by blog links, authority by RSS readership is going to come along and wipe you out with a metric that makes so much more sense.
So I’ve had enough of our relationship, Technorati. I know I haven’t exactly been kind to you in return (it would be polite to call me overly critical), so I think it is time for us to put this mutually destructive relationship to end. I’ve often complained that the biggest mistake a blog can make it not to own it’s own name. I’m moving on to internetducttape.com, and I know you’ll never find me. Even though I’m redirecting my little heart out, you don’t care to follow.
Sincerely,
Formerly known as Honeycakes
Over the top, but I couldn’t help it.
https://engtech.wordpress.com is now http://internetducttape.com, which means my Technorati Authority has dropped to 0. I’ve freed myself from my ball and chain and now I will focus on content and readers instead of traffic and links.
And of course, cool hacks, tricks and mash-ups of existing web services thanks to a little bit of internet duct tape.
Are Bloggers Being Gamed? – Fixing the Technorati Favorites Feature
Darren and Amit both recently wrote some criticisms about how bloggers have been doing Technorati Favorites exchange memes and how it is changing the landscape of the Top 100 Favorites list. (Darren comes in with further clarification as I type this.) Dosh Dosh wrote an insightful response that I feel covers all the issues, but I’ll throw in my $0.02, if only because I have a pocket full of loose change.
If you don’t blog, you probably want to skip this post as it is a hardcore geek out.
Technorati has two top 100 lists, the Top 100 Most Favorited list and the Top 100 Most Linked list. The Most Linked list where your Technorati rank comes from. It is reputable and hard to get on. The Most Favorited list is mostly a joke, and has been for a long time. You need around 3,000 blog links in a six month period to reach the Top 100 Most Linked list but only 200 favorites from all time to reach the Top 100 Most Favorited list.
Technorati Program – Automatically Favorite Anyone Who Favorites You
What Are Technorati Favorites?
Technorati is one of the two largest blog search engines. Technorati Favorites is a way to bookmark other blogs on the Technorati site. By favoriting a blog on Technorati it shows up on your favorites list and you can limit your blog searches to only search within your favorites. It’s a good way to track blogs you only casually follow.
What is Technorati Favorite Your Fans?
This is a program that connects to the Technorati.com service, finds everyone who has favorited your blog and automatically favorites them back.
Technorati Favoritism – Trading Favours
Technorati has long had a “favorite blog” feature where users can mark their favorite blogs and be able to browse recent entries from their favorites (like a poor man’s RSS). They also have a Technorati Top 100 Most Favorited Blogs which gets a lot less attention then the Technorati Rank. Six months ago it took only 60 favorites to become a Top 100 blog, now it is still a lowly 125 favorites. There are only seven blogs with over 700 favorites on all of Technorati. This is a feature that never became popular.
Hack – Display Your Technorati Rank in a Sidebar RSS Widget (Dapper + Yahoo Pipes)
WordPress.com bloggers can’t use nifty WordPress plugins or Javascript to doing something as simple as displaying their Technorati rank in their sidebar. Dapper.net and Yahoo Pipes both give the users the ability to create their own mashups of existing web services. Neither of them quite get it right — Dapper doesn’t give you enough output / programming options and Yahoo Pipes doesn’t give you an interface for scraping any page the way Dapper does. Which is my long-winded way of saying I got Dapper to create RSS feeds that contain nothing but your Technorati rank.
Of course, the interface to the Dapper RSS feed is less than stellar, which is where Yahoo Pipes comes in. Yahoo Pipes also lets me create several flavours depending on what people want.
See the full list of free software I have created.
You can get frequent updates about all of my new software, tools or blog themes by subscribing to IDT Labs by RSS or by email. Or you could just subscribe to my main blog, Internet Duct Tape.
In defense of 2000 bloggers
A conversation has been brewing about the 2000 Bloggers project. It has been called a link farm and an attempt to game Technorati. I won’t speak for the intentions of the guy who created it, but I thought it was a pretty cool idea to see a montage of all the various faces of blogging.
That’s one of the things I really like about the WordPress.com user avatars, MyBlogLog and tools like this one that let me see the last 130 avatars of people who visited my blog. A few months ago someone put together the “Public Face of 9 Rules” montage in a response to a debate that was going on in the community. It looked really good.
Does Technorati Matter? (Searching for Violent Acres)
Technorati.com is probably the best known “blog search engine” (I’d hazard a guess that Google Blog Search is the most used).
Technorati assigns each blog a ranking based on the number of blogs that have linked to it in the past nine months. The ranking says how many blogs have more links than you. You need about 3,000 links to reach the “coveted” Top 100 list. This ranking number is used by news aggregators like TechMeme and for blog advertising networks like ReviewMe.
- I have a bad tendency to treat this number like it matters despite WordPress’ Matt Mullenweg’s comment that being in the Technorati Top 100 will account for less than 200 hits a day.
- I wonder if Technorati is like the DMV and this post is going to get make my blog sleep wit da fishies.
It’s a very useful site for keeping track of who is linking to you. Their about page says they’re “the recognized authority on what’s happening on the World Live Web, right now” and their Wikipedia entry lists them as an “Internet search company”. But how many people actually use it for search? (I think Technorati realizes this and is trying to branch out in other directions — also see Matt.)
They publish a list of popular search terms on the front page of their site. Zeitgeists like this are an interesting way of tracking public interest. For the past few days “Violent Acres” has been at the number one position on the list, and my site has been in the top 5 search results. That has been panning out to around 10-25 hits a day coming from Technorati.
Wait. 10-25 hits for the most popular search term on their site? The search term that they say is more popular than YouTube, WordPress, MySpace, Paris Hilton or the iPhone?
WTF?
Does not compute. As long as I can remember the top 10 popular search terms on Technorati have always been MySpace, YouTube, WordPress, something political and one of those panty-less celebratants. It was cool to see Violent Acres appear on the list. I think she’s fast on the way to becoming one of the most popular blogs on the Internet. But it makes no sense that being the top result for the most popular search term on Technorati for over 24 hours would lead to so little referral traffic. Isn’t this the most popular term people are searching for?
- I ran some tests to make sure my refer logs were picking up all the refers and it looks like the data I’m basing this observation on is correct.
- At the very least this is the number of people who click on the “Top Searches” on the Technorati front page and then click on one of the first results.
So why does the most popular search on Technorati lead to such little traffic?
I don’t know how their algorithm works. I assume it’s the most often used search term. Here are a few potential scenarios why this could happen (ordered from most likely to least likely).
- People are searching for Violent Acres’ blog NOT posts about her blog — so they don’t click on the results that aren’t from her site. (Most likely)
- My titles suck and no one wants to click on them.
- I’m completely overestimating how long I was showing up in the top results.
- No one uses Technorati blog search.
- Technorati Popular Search isn’t search terms — but instead buzz of trends in blogs.
- Someone is spamming the search terms to get the number 1 position. (Least likely)
UPDATE: It looks like this happened because VA mentioned Technorati in this blog post. So one blogger can get to the most popular search result with mentioning Technorati off-hand like that? That still makes me wonder how many people are using it for searching blogs.
Link to most recent chart of mentions of Violent Acres
Does anyone use blog search tools?
I’m heavily involved in blog culture and even I don’t limit my searches to “blogs only” that often. I stick with Google search, like I would for any other web research. I love Technorati’s tools for finding out who is linking to my blog and articles. But that’s navel gazing and picking my bellybutton link — I don’t care what they say about others. I always thought there were people out there using Technorati search even if I wasn’t one of them. Now I’m starting to wonder…
Which search tools do you use? Have you ever used a blog specific search tool like Google Blogsearch, Technorati, or Icerocket?
Related Posts
External Links
Hey Bloggers, PayPerPost is Illegal
Matthew Ingram and Tony Hung go into it in more detail, but the FCC FTC has made a ruling on schemes (like PayPerPost) where bloggers get paid to review products without having to disclose the agreement. Quote: “such marketing could be deceptive if consumers were more likely to trust the product’s endorser “based on their assumed independence from the marketer.”
Raised concerns about a specific type of amplified word-of-mouth marketing, specifically the practice of marketers paying a consumer (the “sponsored consumer”) to distribute a message to other consumers without disclosing the nature of the sponsored consumer’s relationship with the marketer.
We are at the crossroad of determining what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour on the “social” Internet. There’s been a few snafus lately with major corporations and astroturfing (word-of-mouth marketing gone bad). Notably the Walmart story a few months ago, but in just the past few days there has been a fake Playstation 3 blog / viral marketing campaign was revealed.
If bloggers try to do paid reviews via a more ethical / legal service like reviewme.com, they may still be penalized by search engines (more recent) [1]. Search engines like Google use links heavily in their algorithm to determine the top results, and companies have been trying to use sites like PayPerPost and Reviewme.com to buy links and increase their position. Being in the top three results on Google for a search term can make or break a business.
I find the subject interesting because I have participated in word-of-mouth-marketing campaigns for Nokia, O’Reilly and Wiley (free products if I write about them — always disclosed.)
[1] Avoid the search engine penalty by using rel=”nofollow” on the links for paid reviews.
Reviewme.com Reviewed – A Look at the Algorithm from a Bloggers Point of View
There’s a new blog advertising network: reviewme.com
Their goal is to bring advertisers and bloggers together and make it easier for companies who are trying to start Word-of-Mouth marketing campaigns to find bloggers who are willing to shillwrite about them. (See TechCrunch’s take on it.)
They are avoiding most of the controversy that has surrounded other “cash-for-blogging” networks by requiring three things:
- Bloggers have to disclose that it’s a paid review.
- Advertisers have to pay even if it’s a negative review.
- Bloggers retain editorial control and can choose to decline.
- (more info at the FAQ)
They’re also offering a 50/50 split of the advertiser dollar between reviewme.com and the blogger doing the review. That should be enough to ensure that they’re very profitable, while still giving bloggers a nice slice of the pie.
This company will do well if it can convince the advertisers to part with their cash. There is already enough interest in the blogosphere.
They’re confident enough of it’s success and they’re seeding the network and putting up $25,000 for people to write reviews of reviewme.com.
Read more for a comparison of the different payout levels, what bloggers have to consider, what ReviewMe.com could do to improve their site, the best of what other people have to say on the subject and what this means for //engtech in the long run.
Technorati Top 10,000
(More boring blog rank crap that is of interest to no one but me)
Technorati is a blog search engine that also ranks blogs. Getting onto the Technorati Top 100 (or the Top 100 Favorited) is a pretty big accomplishment (if ironic because the only people who seem to know about it are other bloggers). Over a month ago I’d noticed that my Technorati rank had “stalled”. The number of inbound links had fizzled to a fixed amount even though I knew I was getting more links. I put in a support request ticket and waited for response. Nothing.
Around three weeks later I still hadn’t heard anything from them, so I put in another request ticket. Still nothing.
Feedburner and Sage
Colour my face red. I’d been wondering about how to subscribe to Feedburner feeds using Sage, the Firefox RSS Reader extension. With the plethora of subscription options I was wondering “How do I get an XML feed I can bookmark!?”.
It turns this Feedburner page is formatted XML that you can bookmark for Sage. Just ignore the “Subscribe Now!” options and add a live bookmark for the page directly.
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