Arrr, matey! ‘Tis metadata piracy time!
Just in time for the approaching Talk Like A Pirate Day, it appears that Technorati has decided to celebrate by allowing metadata piracy (note for the humor impaired: nobody meant to do it, it’s just a bloody bug that struck me funny, buy a sense of humor).
I was playing with the sweet and elegant Sage feed reader extension for Firefox, which incorporates Technorati cosmos links at the end of items, so at random I clicked on the one for my “Control Zero” post. At the moment, Technorati’s primary description of that post says:
Ctrl + 0 resets Firefox text size back to…
Ctrl + 0 resets Firefox text size back to default 5 hours ago Kayode Okeyode : Ctrl + 0 resets Firefox text size back to default
This post from Hot Links - Level 1 has 6 Links from 5 Sources
Kayode has a great weblog with an always-interesting linklog, which is syndicated through Hot Links. Unless I miss my guess, Technorati saw an item in Hot Links’ feed, properly expressed in RSS 1.0 with the external link in the <link> element, and the Hot Links permalink in the rdf:about attribute on the <item>, and misunderstood that as authoritative about the linked resource, rather than the described resource. (And yes, I can hear the deafening sound of thousands of RDF-heads shouting “that would never have happened if only they used an RDF parser!”)
Maybe it’s just Hot Links (I didn’t find any taken over by anything but it), but it’s Friday night, at least fair odds that they won’t fix it over the weekend: who can we try to have fun with? It should probably be someone who links to their cosmos from their posts, has strongly opinionated posts that would be easy to reverse the sense of with a short description, and it might be a good thing if they have a sense of humor. Ideas?
Thanks Phil, I appreciate your comments.
I have just sent an email to Francois over at Hotlinks about your concerns but I thought I should also mention that my linklog has its own feed in addition to the syndication done by Hotlinks (I will have to make it more prominent though).
Your headline feed was plain enough for me, at least. Though I might have subscribed from the link in Hot Links.
François did notice my post, but I presume he realized that it was Technorati’s problem, not his: the unfortunately unlinkable RDF validator makes it clear as can be, in N3:
<http://dev.upian.com/hotlinks/#item20276> <http://purl.org/rss/1.0/title> "Awesome collage photo of table tennis players"Hot Links item number 20276 has an RSS title of ”Awesome collage photo of table tennis players” - if one wants to know what what the title of the linked resource is, well, too bad: it was an AP story, and has already been removed from Yahoo!’s temporary cache of AP content, just one of the reasons I avoid linking to them. But in general, if one wants to know the title of an RSS
<link>which is not also the<item rdf:about, one needs to look elsewhere, and contrariwise, if one has an RSS title, one should not apply it to the string which appears in the<link>, but to the resource which it isabout.I’d report it as a bug to Technorati, but I’m still considering whether or not I want to play with it a bit, first.
Ouch, yes, that’s definitely a bug in how we do display of post titles. I’ve filed the bug - we’ll have a fix out soon.
Sorry about that!
Dave
Arrr! Well blow me down!
Me Cosmos’s been hijacked by some scurvy blog. I canna say how they done it, but when I find out, someone’ll walk the plank fer sure!
Th’ bloody lootin’ bilge-rats have been at me Cosmos t’ boot, ’n have had it away entire! ’Tis a blessing I dinna fly it o’er th’ yardarm, as ye do.