I've had a really enjoyable and relaxing weekend which is, unusually for me, bleeding into my Monday.
Saturday I bought some rugged shelves for the office and did some major re-arranging. Over the last couple of months the office has become incrementally more full of junk and heaps of equipment. The shelves and a few storage containers have made a huge difference and, along with getting rid of a lot of the junk, the office has become a habitable workspace again. Also now that I'm centred on the PowerBook and just have it and a 17" flat panel I have more deskspace. I think I could even study in here! Grade: A- (cos the shelves aren't aesthetically pleasing)
Saturday evening I went out to see Kung-Fu Hustle again with Starbuck and Mr.Starbuck (actually maybe I shouldn't call him that). The film was mighty and I think I want to try and see it at least one more time before it finishes it's run. After the movie we went back to Old St. for some pasta, a very nice red Zinfandel, and a cheese-cake of awesomeness. It was a strong battle of wills not to be the one holding the cheesecake at the end of the night! Grade: A+
Sunday I did some more tidying then zipped down to see my dad to pick up an unwanted LaserJet 6P he scored for me (which prompted the whole shelving incident). I've wanted a laser printer for a while now and those LJ6's are real workhorse printers. The best deal I've found on HP toner cartridges is Laser Media Supplies (a steal at £43!). I'm planning to measure my usage with the original cartridge, then I'll try a compatible and compare quality/value. Grade: A
After doing ladder duty while my Dad washed his upstairs windows (every 15 years whether they need them or not!) I had a pretty relaxing journey home and ended up eating pasta with a little green pesto before bed.
Weekend grade: A
I just Kevin Burton's response to Jason Kottke abandoning Technorati in which he says:
I'd rather have a Technorati that was fast and always worked even if that meant only indexing 1M blogs. Even 500k blogs as long as they are the top 500k blogs.
Which is, I think, indicative of a class of problems people are experiencing in thinking about the blogosphere that revolve around a concept I'll call
Leaderboardism.
Right now Technorati are claiming to index 15.7 million blogs and have a database of 1.4 billion links. WOW! Those numbers are certainly impressive. But what does this huge data-warehouse buy us? Gripes about performance and database outtages aside, not much it would seem. I don't get anything from a Technorati search that I value over, say, a Google search. In particular I don't seem to get value from Technorati understanding the blogosphere better than Google which you would think they really should.
Kevin thinks a better idea is to just index the most important 500,000 (3% of Technorati's claimed reach) of blogs in the blogosphere. Sure that would make Technorati fast. But would it make it more useful? After all, who is deciding who is important? How are they deciding it? And isn't importance subjective anyway? To my way of thinking what Kevin is advocating would make Technorati faster and less useful in equal measure (unless you are mainly interested in what the usual suspects think).
The problem is that the blogosphere has grown too large for summary statistics to be relevant to a large group of people anymore. Your Top 100 isn't mine because you aren't interested in basketweaving and vole racing and I am.
I think Technorati (and Feedster who seem, so far, to have avoided many of Technorati's pitfalls) should abandon Leaderboardism and focus instead on how to make their database relevant to each individual.
Relevance is about understanding the context of the reader and delivering the results they would have asked for if they'd only known what they were. I will consider it a success not when I can see The Top 100 Blogs but when I can see The Top 100 Blogs you've never come across but will wish you had! For reference I read 2 of Technorati's Top 100 (although I have read about 30% at one time or other and am familiar with over half) so clearly their measure of relevance doesn't match mine very closely.
This takes me all the way back to where I started thinking about Village Shops in Blogspace.
Update: This post lead to me being asked to contribute to an article on Technorati, and later to my posting a follow-up item.