Technorati - Does It's Tagging System Allow Bloggers To Shut Out Voices?

Masood Mortazavi says this:

...Apparently, Jon had the good fortune of attending Peter Hirshberg's birthday party during which Peter showed off some of the new cool things about Technorati, but what grabbed my attention was Peter's discussion of the way Technorati is constraining its tag system.

For some reason, I never read about these constraints anywhere else when I first started using the tags. Here's a quote from Jon's article:

Lest omnivorous bloggers try to game the system and claim they cover subjects they rarely write about, they can declare expertise in only 20 subjects, and a feedback mechanism lets users suggest that blogs be removed from certain categories. Because Technorati scans 16.4 million blogs, all it takes is those bloggers spending a few minutes with the database "for the entire system [to] get smart and correct itself very quickly," says Hirshberg.


What this means is that if there are enough users organized to remove someone from a particular topic, they'll be able to do it. This is rule of the masses, not the rule of the free expression of ideas, and while I don't have anything against the masses, I have always found suppression of ideas quite reprehensible. What is even worse in my case is my prolific use of the tags, which have taken me to several dozen different topics. I find it ridiculous that the writer is limited to the use of only 20 tags. That might work for an advertising agency working for a corporation but it doesn't quite work for the free-wheeling blogger. As a lite-relativist, I've always had trouble with expertise being defined in such narrow ways. I spent my graduate years trying to escape it and now here we have a system that can do quite a bit of good in bringing you to greater number of readers but that puts restraints on how you stream your thoughts and what you write about. So, I'm out.

At least for right now, I have to say: Goodbye To Technoratic Tags!!!

No longer, will I bother and waste time with them. They may be good for category writers but not for me unless policies such as those above change.

Jon Fine's column is available online for free. By the way, in it, Fine mentions some Technorati competitors.

This is very disturbing news given Technorati's size. Dave Sifry should alter this ASAP!