Is Technorati gaming Google?
Update: Technorati DOES recognize links to other sites for tags, it's just not apparent if you don't check their help page. So you can pretty much ignore what I wrote here. I'd still like it if they made it clearer upfront.
Technorati's new tag feature is brilliant, however, they're trying to game Google. I love Technorati but this is such an obvious scam that it makes me mad.
On every tag page, they tell people that, "To contribute, just make a post to your blog about xx and include the link below. http://www.technorati.com/tag/x".
This means that, if you want your blogpost to show up on the Technorati page, the easiest way to do it is to add a link with that keyword to that Technorati page. Sounds like Google gaming to me. All the good keywords will suddenly have a really good Technorati page for them, and lots and lots of links to the page, using thta keyword, with relevant posts. In a way that's fine, it makes semantic sense on the web. In another way though, it's not fine, because there is NO reason why they link should go to them, if the rel attribute indicates it's a tag. They are excluding other tag namespaces.
What they should do instead, is accept ANY link that has the rel="tag" in it. That's how namespaces work, remember. Now they might already be doing that, but it's not clear from the tag pages. What they say on those pages, essentially, is: "We will put a link to your post on this page, if you put a link to this page, with this word, on your site." It's just dodgy, and I'd like them to change that.
Of course, I haven't really thought this through in any great detail, so I've probably missed something. Enlighten me!
(Can you tell I haven't had my coffee yet? The reason I became angry is that I found myself adding lots and lots of keyword links to Technorati in my posts, and I thought, wait a minute! This is fishy!)