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).