Drove up to San Francisco tonight for the Technorati party organized by Niall Kennedy. Dave Sifry announced that over 1B links were now in their index, tracking 8.4M blogs. Scott Beale over at Laughing Squid has a good write-up.
I briefly caught up with Dave and Tantek, talking about the kind of spam that photo sites like us get, typically product placements inundating popular galleries, but also adult sites posting "certain types of photos" that we have to hunt down and remove.
As we are talking about links, check out new PubSub LinkCounts (and Bob's post). Sounds a bit funny that the top 8 sites are photo storage related.
Jonas was in attendance, and obviously discussions circled around the "Wordpress incident", regarding which he posted a reasonably restrained note (for someone who had coded for 2 days straight). He clarified for us that Matt had removed the incriminated links, and would provide his view/version/explanation of the incident when he comes back from Italy. Jonas also mentioned that he was helping Matt on the setup of a foundation, not a company as it has been widely reported (though this is what I understood as well from this). And he is spending his time answering phone calls and emails from journalists (he got a call every 4 minutes or so when we were chatting). I suggest to also read his subsequent posts.
My personal take on the whole story is that, as usual, it is exaggerated and Matt, who was praised just a few days ago, is now vilified. And yes, manipulating search engine results by using one's juice is "bad", but then get in line people, everyone is doing it. The only issue I see is one of transparency, if he needed income to cover his expenses, then he should have mentioned in openly and put these links up without hiding them. People contributing to the open source movement have to provide for their families and pay their mortgages at the end of the month, like everyone else. So let's chill out and wait for Matt's explanation (which has just been posted here).
Anyway, thanks to Technorati for organizing this party, and thanks for the T-Shirt (I won in the raffle).
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