Technorati Slaps 2000 Bloggers

Earlier, I wrote about the 2000 bloggers project. It was started by Tino Buntic who had an idea to connect the bloggers in a photo collage.

However, Technorati didnt seem to like the idea too much. According to David Utter, writer for WebProNews, Technorati views the 2000 blogger project as a "scheme" to manipulate blog popularity. Timo himself came out and said:

"I guess Technorati is upset with me. That doesn't feel good, now. Anyway, I got about 1700 on my collage. I don't even know if I should finish it. I'll take down the code to repost it."

While I liked the idea, the interactivity, the creativity of the project and I admire Timo for getting this started, I think what's happening here is Technorati ascribing "intent" in the project. In other words, just because it could be potentially viewed as a link farm or manipulation of the search results or technorati rankings, then it will be viewed as such. Technorati's hard line view on this practice is a little disappointing. It seems like they're throwing away the nature of the interactive social project because it's a potential manipulator.

The 2000 blogger project, while it did provide links to blogs, neither advertised itself as a way to capture links nor did it set up several image/ link collages and essentially limited itself to only 2000 blog participants. If this was a self perpetuating link farm, then I would have no problem with Technorati's stance. Unfortunately, it seems that the intent of the project was not enough to give sway to Technorati's staff who are closing it.

Oh well, links are like tools, they can be used to build and they can be used to destroy... they have the potential to do both. In this case, just because there was a potential to do bad things... they knocked it.