On every post I write, I use Ultimate Tag Warrior to insert some Technorati tags, which show up at the bottom of the post. I’ve been thinking lots about metadata lately — and started wondering how useful those tags actually are (and how much traffic they actually generate).
Wikipedia describes metadata as “‘data about data.’ It can generally be thought of as information that describes, or supplements, the central data. For example, metadata produced by digital still cameras describe the settings used for the picture, such as exposure value or flash intensity. In such cases, the metadata can be considered as extra data, which merely add information, and is not critical to the functions of the main data.”
More and more often however, metadata doesn’t end up being a few keywords or even supplemental at all. For example, if I want to provide some metadata on the poet T.S. Eliot, I might include his date of birth, birthplace and even some of the titles of stuff that he’s written.
But what if I wanted to provide all of the text he ever wrote as metadata about him? Maybe I also want to provide the entire history of St. Louis, Missouri as well (where Eliot was born)? It would seem that I am no longer providing metadata about another data set, but rather I’m just linking two sets of data together (Eliot’s biography and the text of his works).
In reality, it would appear I’m just providing mesodata (OK, I just made up that word, but I think it accurately describes what I’m talking about). For example, a link on the Web that goes from one body of data to another (from the Eliot biography page to the Eliot writing text page), is really just a small piece of data that indicates to the user how the two things are linked together.
This seems pretty obvious doesn’t it? Well, yes, I wouldn’t say this should come as a great revelation to anyone. But when talking about metadata, too often the assumption is that we’re extracting or creating a small set of data that can be used to describe the broader data set — when it can often be the opposite.
So how does this relate to Technorati? Well, I want to know how useful these tags are that I’m sticking on every post on this site. Does this user-created metadata really improve the findability of the information I’m posting (on Technorati, but also on Google or other search engines as well)?
Here’s the experiment: I’m going to tag this post with the top 10 search terms on Technorati and see how much (if any) traffic comes to this site through searches on those terms on Technorati, Google or other search engines. I don’t really have any prediction for what will happen when I do this — I just hope to get some indication of how useful this metadata actually is.
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March 26th, 2007 at 12:00 pm
Yep you got me.
I want to beat Steve Furtick at his game. Help me get above him on the technorati search list.
March 26th, 2007 at 12:02 pm
Well I did a similar experiment.
I looked at the top ten searches, and found that half of them were things I wouldn’t really search for, and the other half were things i’d never heard of.
I wondered why Steven Furtick was on the list and Bob Woolmer wasn’t — Bob Woolmer has bene in the news, but Steven Furtick hasn’t.
Yet, Paris Hilton has been in the news but Tshwane Sheraton hasn’t, but Tshwane Sheraton doesn’t trump Paris Hilton. .
March 26th, 2007 at 1:35 pm
Well, here’s the update so far after this post having been up for about 3 hours. Feedburner stats are not showing me a single visit from either Technorati or a Google (or other search engine search) that includes any of these search terms. So if you got here through either of those means, please, leave a comment and let me know.
I’ll be checking my more detailed site stats later on in the evening, and would happily post them here after a few days so we can all see the results of the experiment.
March 26th, 2007 at 1:37 pm
That’s a good point Steve — on any given day, I haven’t heard of most of the things in the Technorati top ten searches. I just always assumed I just didn’t know what was going on in the world. But it would seem there’s just a viral effect — the more people that post/search about something, the faster it grows.
March 27th, 2007 at 9:50 pm
[...] Lucas from Uncommon Knowledge has just straight up made a word up – “Mesodata” and used it in a very interesting post titled Mesodata and the true Technorati Traffic Test [...]
March 28th, 2007 at 6:24 am
This is an interesting study. I’ve always wondered why I haven’t heard of some(or all) of the Technorati top ten searches on any given day. Now I know(from this post2 and its comments) that there are other people like me. I wonder whether there are more. Naturally, this leads to the question: who makes those particular searches?
March 28th, 2007 at 9:41 am
Thanks kayliz. I just had to know if the Technorati tags I was appending to my posts were actually making any kind of difference at all — and the evidence so far indicates that they are in fact making no difference whatsoever. So I think that part of the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin will just get turned off — thereby saving me from having these ugly keywords showing up on the front page.
April 4th, 2007 at 10:11 pm
I personally see very little traffic coming from the technorati tags. I stopped showing them a few months ago, and it didn’t affect me in a bad way at all.
April 21st, 2007 at 5:30 am
Prior to moving to a WordPress hosted solution a couple of weeks ago, I had Technorati tags embedded in all my Blogger posts. I migrated these over and they’re still in there but I haven’t bothered to do so with posts since coming over to WordPress. My impression is that Technorati tags are not very helpful. I’ve never gotten any significant traffic from their use.
That said, I never had any significant issues getting Technorati to update itself about my old site. In fact, I still see incoming links added to it on a regular basis. Getting Technorati to update itself about the new site, on the other hand, has been a bit problematic at times. Any connection or is Technorati just slower to index links for newer sites?
April 27th, 2007 at 4:26 am
This is a nice case study with inserting tags.
March 24th, 2009 at 1:35 am
Hiya, i have seen your site when searching a few weeks ago and i really love the design! I just bought a new 3 character domain (cost me a packet) for a niche review blog, and i was wondering if your design is a free or paid one? I’m new to WordPress and about to set it up, and i would really like to get something with a similar look to yours. Any ideas where i could download or buy something similar? Thanks for your help!
March 26th, 2009 at 11:04 am
Hi Max — my theme is a heavily customized version of iTheme, which is available for free download.
If you need any help setting up the theme or customizing it, just let me know and I’ll be happy to help you out.