Thursday, June 14, 2007

Technorati censors Ron Paul?

According to No Governor Anywhere [Link] Technorati has some fishy business going on. I went to the Technorati site and found the same things that he had.

I examined the source code and found that there is, indeed, something weird going on. Ron Paul's "spot" on the list has been replaced by:

<li class="e1">
<a href="/wtf?new&topic=" class="trk" title="Why is hot?">
<img src="http://static.technorati.com/static/css/img/icn/icon-wtf-off-small.png" alt="WTF: " />

</a>

<a href="/tag/" class="trk" title="See what people are saying about right now"> </a></li>
This seems very odd. I would guess that this is a server-side problem instead of a deliberate attempt to censor Ron Paul. However, you are allowed to your own opinion of the situation.

Edit: All Ron Paul references have been deleted from Technorati's front page. Again, I'm still hoping for the best and that Technorati is just having technical problems.

Edit2: The mystery continues. It seems that it is fluctuating from a full Ron Paul reference in correct form to having nothing to show for it (reducing the top 10 to a top 9). Very odd indeed and something that wouldn't be intentional. Though, sloppy hacking cannot be ruled out.

Edit3: Adding MORE to the "What the Fuck?" factor, when the Ron Paul shows up second on the "What's Hot?" list, an odd tag shows up in the "Popular" section. It says "wtf/ron-paul/2007/06/13/ron-paul-s-interview" and links to "wtf" tags. Also, I notice that the page to display a blog's authority has been updated. So, and I'm going to reiterate, I think that they updated the code for the server and fucked up something in there.

Final Edit/Update: Technorati is back to "normal" with a few updates. The only change to the front page is that the tag cloud no longer is "size-sensitive" but is, instead, alphabetized. Probably just some minor bugs while implementing new code. I'd have to say that doesn't constitute censorship. Yay! The blogosphere is still free.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Sweet, I haven't been near a computer all night and morning so I wasn't able to check up on this. Glad to see it wasn't anything fishy.