Complaining About the Free Ice Cream

Recently Brad Delong had a nice post about someone complaining about Technorati because they didn’t have the most recent links available. Brad said that this was a little like complaining about free ice cream.

Let me join those complaining about the quality of the free ice cream that is Techorati these days,
[...]
My experience with the beta site is that large parts of it, like "sort incoming links by 'most authority,'" simply don't work at all; you wait forever for no result. (We [the letter writer to Brad Delong and Brad] both realize this is arguably a variety of complaining about the free ice cream, and yet.)

Well Technorati is like free ice cream and I’ve gorged myself on it for the last couple of months. I use it to find blogs that have linked to my blog. I want to know because I put everyone who has ever linked to Chocolate and Gold Coins on my blogroll - in the “linked to C&GC” category. Also, bloggers that link to me usually have good taste and write interesting blogs that I want to read.

I used to run a Technorati search every day and use the results as a sort of link page. I would just go to the blogs that linked to me to find out if there’s anything new and interesting there. Of course, I could just go to my own homepage, but it’s not automatically updated like Technorati.

But Technorati has always been a mystery to me. It doesn’t find all of the links; I’ve found some overlooked links purely by accident. India Uncut (India’s premiere blog) has linked to my blog at least 19 times, but the only post that Technorati would find was this one from 3 months ago.

Well, if Technorati was annoying before, now it’s useless. Every time I run it, it fails. The free ice cream has melted.

Or maybe this was free heroin. Now that they have us addicted, I can see a fee for service coming. Does anyone remember when Cricinfo was having bandwidth problems and began Cricinfo Plus - a pay site? Cricinfo dumped Cricinfo Plus with little fanfare but not before relieving me of $20.

I remember years ago that there was an anti-drug public service announcement that went something like this:
Punk 1: “How much do I charge?”
Punk 2: “Nothing now. Just give it away. Then wait and see who comes back for more.”
Punk 1: “Then I charge them.”
Punk 2: “You catch on quickly.”

I was thinking, “Great, that’s what we need, a public service announcement showing pushers how to better market their illegal drugs.”

So what became of the punks? My guess is they quit pushing drugs and are now marketing Technorati.

Update: This is ironic: someone linked to this article and I cannot know who did this - Technorati won't say. If someone would please leave a comment about where the link originated, I would be most appreciative.