technorati

[A rare, I hope, instance of me meta-blogging…]

Something very odd is going on with technorati.

I’ve been a little frustrated, as over a week ago it seems they stopped indexing this page, just when I was in the middle of retrospectively adding tags to previous posts. I wrote several emails to their support, but no answer.

And I’ve been keeping essentially all my posts on the front page here until technorati spiders come and index it–even though that breaks my feed.

It’s all been a bit of a pain. Most of all, in that, in a fervor of thinking that this tag business was in fact a good thing (partly having been convinced of their worth by Brian Lamb of Abject Learning), I’d spent quite a while adding all those tags…

(I suspect that some algorithm had determined that so many new tags in such a short time meant that my blog was a spam blog; but 10 seconds looking at it should, one might have thought, have convinced a human observer otherwise…)

In further frustration, I cc-ed the last couple of my emails to David Sifry, technorati’s founder and CEO. He wrote back and said he’d look into the problem personally. Which is kind of cool, but it would be easier on him if his minions were more efficient about responding to support queries.

Now, meanwhile, for a bunch of different tags that I’ve been using it’s showing all the posts as having updated 21 hours ago. Check out mormons, say, or, most strangely of all, last100, a tag of my own creation (referring to a class I teach) that right now shows 8 empty entries, all apparently posted exactly 21 hours ago. Though others such as martin parr still don’t show up, let alone, I’m especially sad to say, posthegemony.

I have no idea what’s going on.

[Update: well, that bizarreness seems to have passed. But they still ain’t indexing this blog… Oh, and there’s still something odd with the tag last100.]

[Update: this is very close to being a story with a happy ending… The vast majority of my tags were indexed sometime overnight. Still problems with a few, however, that I have created: arrighi, indigenism, and new left review, for instance.]

[Update: and those tags are now fixed… Normal service to be resumed.]

Abigail’s Party

Ray Carney on Mike Leigh’s television drama, Abigail’s Party:

There is no realm of “truth” underneath or distinguishable from the realm of “falsehood.” There are no secrets to exhume. There are no psychological depths to mine–or at least none that matter–in Abigail’s Party. No one is being deceitful. No one is covering up anything. That would simplify understanding. We could dive down and discover the truth as we do in films like Citizen Kane or Casablanca. The situation Leigh imagines–here and in all of his work–is far more complex. There is no escape from slippery, shifting, multivalent surfaces. There is no realm of unsullied, uninflected reality underneath. Everything is mixed. We must live in the flux….

Indeed, it’s the fact that everyone says what they think in this film that makes it so painful to watch. Which shows that this postideological flux has everything to do with affect (the barbs, the resentment, the worry, and the drunkenness of suburban social interaction) and habit (the pettiness, the gender roles, the classification by taste, and the drunkenness again).