The Technorati Tag API is Broken, or so asserts Kevin Burton. The post is a little old and the comments don’t seem to have gone anywhere. I think the tag having to appear in the URI is a weakness, and a restriction that isn’t reasonable under many hosting enviroments. That said, my understanding of rel="tag" is that they don’t have to link to Technorati at all, they can link to your own taxonomy and not Google bomb key terms. (As WordPress does in 1.5.) You don’t even really need to use the links, since they spider categories and dc:subject from RSS feeds anyway, but if you do tag you posts using the link method, it might be worth using nofollow.
Kevin Marks had a good response to Kevin Burton’s comments and Kevin Burton and I talked about this at length in person. The Technorati implementation follows the tag specifications outlined by W3C and IETF.
You are correct in your understanding of the tag links: you can point them anywhere. This behavior is outlined on the Technorati tag help page. Technorati simply provides one possible functional destination. If you feel your post tags provide more value when linked to Wikipedia entries Technorati will still identify your tags.
Thanks for that Niall!
About the only thing concerning Technorati that isn’t or doesn’t get broken was their leap into the political arena last fall.
Everything else seems to stall, fall away, or hit some sort of dysfunctional wall. My page, for instance, persistently shows ‘657 links from 486 sources’ across days and weeks. This no matter how many links come in or fall away.
The only way to reset it is to, every week or so, email support and then wait for a two or three days until they do something to in manually.
It has become my persistent impression that Technorati is one of those companies that is always dropping some new “hot functionality” in (last Fall political blogs, today folksonomies) rather than getting their core functionality right. It’s like they look to thrive on buzz rather than competence.
I noticed the same thing and the Technorati folks were friendly enough to explain things in a comment:
http://poorbuthappy.com/ease/archives/2005/02/02/2487/is-technorati-gaming-google