There have been many discussions already on the ongoing Technorati Favorites Exchange experiment on the blogosphere and I don’t intend to jump into the fray as a self-proclaimed expert giving my opinion on the rights and wrongs about it. Instead I will write here about some things that I think I have learnt, and happily, from the experience.

Quickly for those who come in late, Technorati is one of the leading blog search engines on the web today with a registered database of over 71 million blogs that it tracks regularly. It lists down the top blogs in two categories - a) by the number of links that a particular blog receives from other blogs, and b) by the number of favorite votes that a particular blog receives from other blogs.

The experiment in question was that hundreds of blogs were swapping favorite votes among themselves. The Technorati Top 100 Favorites blog listing started to reflect many blogs that were not there before. The big bloggers, who were in the list earlier, complained that the swapping was unethical and wrong. The bloggers who were doing the exchanges denied the allegations and said everything is fair and the favorites feature was supposed to be for that only, and if two consenting adults are favoriting each other, what was anybody’s problem.

Some readers of this blogs might have wondered how come I, as a PR blogger, joined such a thing that seems to be totally out of the gamut of the profession. To me, this was just as any other SEO experiment. Today in this age where internet search engines rankings rule internet visibility, there are talks about optimising how to write blog post headline or content, choosing key words that search engines are likely to pick up, submitting sites in directories, getting links from authority sites, leaving comments on other’s blogs and forums, using social bookmarking buttons, etc. etc. Webmasters and SEO experts are implementing every tactics on their sleeves to gain more exposure for their sites. As PR professionals, we are trying to make use of these new tools to gain more visibility for our clients on the Internet. This was a chance where I could dive into the pool and experience for myself how it was like being in the water, instead of being a spectator and commenting from dry land. Of course I wanted to get a better ranking at Technorati and see how far I could go.

Going back to what I actually wanted to write this post about, I’m putting my thoughts as I felt now below:

1. Getting to find the deep blogosphere - I exchanged favorites with more than 250 blogs. I visited each blog and while trying to see if they have mentioned my blog or looking for their ‘Add me to favorites’ Technorati button, I ended up reading a lot of what they actually have on their blogs. I find many of the blogs quite interesting and subscribed to them. Apart from these, I was exposed to a hundreds of blog designs, tools, and widgets these blogs were using that I could use for mine. This was one side of the blogosphere, like the deep web, that was hidden from the surface and was waiting to be found.

Many of these blogs were bold and I could see that didn’t write with that overwhelming self-restriction that some top blogs today have to be politically correct. I feel that some blogs, as they grow, tend to increasingly produce content that is similar with a few traditional newspaper reporting - less of opinions and more of factual information, reviews that are done to look generally genuine yet keeping in context that it will read by many diverse mindsets, essays and analysis that are undeniably impressive but lack the spontaneity of what an online diary used to be.

Bloggers with few hundred subscribers try to respond to their readers on every comment. So when I commented on one of these, I felt like I was talking to someone like myself, and not to an established blogger who considers himself an expert on what he writes and replies on specific comments that he thinks is important enough.

I would not have found these blogs so easily except for this experiment. Their blog updates would have mostly appeared on Technorati’s third page where few people would have gone to look at. For a moment, I asked myself, 71 million blogs and where the hell are all of them.

2. Top bloggers are not immune to dissension - Even if some are top bloggers in their niche and everything they write are taken like the scripts of the Holy Bible, there are times when they come up with some things that are just what many wanted to not read about. I wondered when some top blogs wrote both against the exchanges going place and also on the Technorati’s list, what were they trying to say after all? They were not siding with anyone yet creating enemies of both. At the end, people just said it was the hurt ego of having the small timers trying to and almost succeeding in toppling them down on the Top 100 list. I know this sounds like a little in contrast with what I wrote in Point No.1 above - people should speak their opinion – but it’s not. Being opinionated is something and being judgmental is something else.

3. Oh! Technorati - I suppose why Technorati has not come out with anything over the issue is because it has been caught in a fix. On one hand are hundreds of bloggers who were using its favorites service and helping it gain popularity. Theoretically speaking, there was nothing wrong in what these bloggers were doing. Going against these bloggers would have been a bad PR move - after all, these blogs are what Technorati is made up of and these bloggers are who give Technorati its huge site traffic. That said, on the other hand, its Top 100 Favorites list was on the verge of losing its importance as the ultimate list of top blogs in the blogosphere.

Technorati must have realised that the problem was with its own raking system itself. There should have been something like reciprocal favoriting getting lesser points than a one-way favoriting, or something similar to how Google has crafted their search engine algorithms. The current revamp of its site looks like a realisation of a need to revisit its permutations and combinations that will help it retain its leading role as the leading blog intelligence station in the blogosphere. Good move I should say – quietly focusing more on uplifting its own internal systems instead of taking a stand for or against the A-list bloggers or the rest of the squad.

4. Ripples felt in Mybloglog community – As the favorites exchanging bloggers surf around the blogosphere, I could see dozens of faces changing by the minute in Mybloglog’s ‘Recent Readers’ widget on my blog. Similarly as I visited other sites, I realised my avatar would have been seen in hundreds of blogs. If I visited a blog twice, Mybloglog would send me an email saying that I have been automatically added to that blog’s community. Ditto, I got some new additions to my community as well.

5. Learn programming – There has been almost a mini industry created, thanks to this experiment. Most likely there will be one if the exchanges continue.

When I read about the automatic programmes created to help facilitate these favorites exchanges, I wished I knew programming and every other bit of technical knowledge required so that I could create trademark a software after my name. Looking at it, the web 2.0 has been full of such opportunities – the mini programmes and add-ons created after del.icio.us, Technorati, Blogger, Firefox, etc. etc. And opportunities might continue to rise. So why the heck don’t I just learn programming now?

To sum up, all said and done, if you remember what I wrote earlier about how I wanted to see how far the experiment would take my ranking on the Technorati Top 100 Favorites list, it’s good news.