taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

The Irish Internet Association have a weblog at blog.iia.ie. Back on January 30, this had a Technorati rank of 587893, with 21 inbound links from 14 blogs. That’s about what you’d expect — comparable with Chris Horn’s blog, for instance.

However, fast forward to today, and in the intervening 3 months, it seems to have suddenly shot up to 23,322 inbound links from 550 blogs, giving it a Technorati rank of 6,870.

To put that in perspective, that puts it comfortably in the top 3 in the Irish Blogs Technorati Top 100 — beating Damien Mulley’s 7,859, but just short of Donncha O’Caoimh’s stellar 3,434 — and ahead of these other gods of the Irish blogosphere:

• Tom Raftery (14,800, 9,224 links)
• THE Graham Linehan (13,165)
• Slugger O’Toole (17,279, 2,941 links)
• Twenty Major (18,001)
• Nialler9 (24,286)

Pretty impressive ;)

I was curious, so I went investigating. Of those thousands of inbound links, here’s some samples of the most recent, pasted from the Technorati inbound links page:

barkingmoose

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The Peninsula’s Edge

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6 days ago in The Peninsula’s Edge by ricsmith510 · Authority: 9

The Incredible Blog

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7 days ago in The Incredible Blog · Authority: 1

Quilters’ Blogs

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TPN :: Martial Arts Explorer

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Take a look at the ‘inbound links’ list — thousands more just like that.

All of the affected blogs have been hacked to deliver these spam links. They run unpatched versions of Wordpress vulnerable to a major security hole. On a casual visit, their pages seem fine — but “View Source”, scroll to the bottom, and there are thousands of spam links for drugs, ringtones, cheap credit, etc. on each one, exactly as above, and as described by Kevin Burton in his description of the current epidemic of blog spam.

How did links to the IIA’s blog wind up in this collection?

It’s worth noting that the IIA’s blog does not display the same symptoms — the links aren’t present on their pages.

However, this post provided a good tip as to what has happened. Those infected blog pages point, in turn, to other infected blogs. Somewhere within the IIA’s blog setup, there’s a page inserted by a bad guy, collecting thousands of illicit links from thousands of other infected sites — and sure enough, Irish Web Watcher found it on the IIA’s site — here it is.

Looks like the IIA have a pretty major disinfection job on their hands, and urgently — there’s already a lot of spammy results appearing in the Google index from that site, and the next step after that is usually removal from the index once Google notice it.

Tags: blogs, iia, ireland, security, technorati, wordpress

For the benefit of other Technorati API users…

In a comment on this entry, Padraig Brady mentioned that his blog had mysteriously disappeared from the Irish Blogs Top 100 list.

I investigated, and found something odd — it seems Technorati has made a change to their bloginfo API, now listing weblogs with their ‘rank’, but without some of the important metadata, like ‘inboundblogs’, ‘inboundlinks’, and with a ‘lastupdate’ time set to the epoch (1970-01-01 00:00:00 GMT), in the API. Here’s an example:

<!-- generator="Technorati API version 1.0" -->
<!DOCTYPE tapi PUBLIC "-//Technorati, Inc.//DTD TAPI 0.02//EN"
                 "http://api.technorati.com/dtd/tapi-002.xml">
<tapi version="1.0">
<document>
    <result>
        <url>http://www.pixelbeat.org</url>
                    <weblog>
                <name>Pádraig Brady</name>
                <url>http://www.pixelbeat.org</url>
                <rssurl></rssurl>
                <atomurl></atomurl>
                <inboundblogs></inboundblogs>
                <inboundlinks></inboundlinks>
                <lastupdate>1970-01-01 00:00:00 GMT</lastupdate>
                <rank>74830</rank>
            </weblog>
                            </result>
</document>
</tapi>

Compare that with this lookup result, on my own blog:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!-- generator="Technorati API version 1.0" -->
<!DOCTYPE tapi PUBLIC "-//Technorati, Inc.//DTD TAPI 0.02//EN"
                 "http://api.technorati.com/dtd/tapi-002.xml">
<tapi version="1.0">
<document>
    <result>
        <url>http://taint.org</url>
                    <weblog>
                <name>taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog</name>
                <url>http://taint.org</url>
                <rssurl>http://taint.org/feed</rssurl>
                <atomurl>http://taint.org/feed/atom</atomurl>
                <inboundblogs>143</inboundblogs>
                <inboundlinks>227</inboundlinks>
                <lastupdate>2008-02-12 11:48:10 GMT</lastupdate>
                <rank>43404</rank>
            </weblog>
                            <inboundblogs>143</inboundblogs>
                            <inboundlinks>227</inboundlinks>
            </result>
</document>
</tapi>

This bug had caused a number of blogs to be dropped from the list, since I was using “inboundblogs and inboundlinks == 0″ as an indication that a blog was not registered with Technorati.

It’s now worked around in my code, although a side-effect is that blogs which have this set will appear with question-marks in the ‘inboundblogs’ and ‘inboundlinks’ columns, and will perform poorly in the ‘ranked by inbound link count’ table (unsurprisingly).

I’ve posted a query to the support forum — let’s see what the story is.

Tags: api, bloginfo, blogs, bugs, irishblogs, technorati

Damien posted an interesting suggestion for the Irish Blogs Top 100 the other day — during discussion of which, it emerged that there were a few overlooked Irish blogs which hadn’t yet shown up on the planet.journals.ie Irish blogs aggregator, and therefore were not appearing in the Top 100. These were:

• Twenty Major (oops! a major omission, sorry Twenty — he’d moved from a Blogspot URL to his own domain)
• Linden Lifestyles, an Irish-based Second Life accessories blog
• John Handelaar’s blog
• and Donncha O’Caoimh’s InPhotos.org.

Anyway, they’re in now. When I first spun up the script and checked the results, though I was a bit shocked and had to do a bit of a double-take — at number 1, far beyond Damien’s number 2, was InPhotos.org, with a Technorati Rank of 1 and 102,857 inbound links from 88,772 blogs, compared to Damien’s Rank of 7946 with 1,606 links from 519 blogs.

Insane! I guess being in the default Wordpress install makes a bit of difference there ;)

Interestingly, InPhotos.org, with a Technorati Authority of 88,434, is far beyond the most popular blog listed on the Technorati Popular Blogs page. It seems that page is a hand-tweaked set of blogs, and not just a “Technorati global Top 100″, then, despite what one might naively assume…

PS: Damien’s original suggestion, btw, was to measure blog popularity using Google Reader and Feedburner’s audience stats. However, I can’t do that without a public API I’m allowed to scrape. Does anyone know of one?

Also worth noting that I recently added del.icio.us bookmarks as a metric of popularity, to go with the Technorati stuff. It’s interesting to see how those rankings differ — bloggers and bookmarkers don’t always agree, with bookmarkers preferring MP3s, Second Life, and politics I reckon.

Tags: blogs, damien-mulley, donncha-o-caoimh, inphotos.org, ireland, irishblogs, journals.ie, technorati, top100

Over on the Technorati Top 100 of Irish Blogs list, I’ve noticed something; quite a few of the listings have stopped publishing, such as number 5, Tom Murphy’s Natterjackpr.com.

I’m wondering — should no-longer-publishing blogs be listed? Technorati still keeps their ranking high — clearly old data is not expired from the Technorati database for at least a year. But maybe my scripts should use last-post-published time, from planet.journals.ie where available, and discard blogs that haven’t put anything up in something like 4 months.

What do you think?

Tags: blogs, irishblogs, technorati, top-100