An Open Letter to Technorati Support

Dear Technorati Support,

Please get that damn kid w/the baseball cap off my profile.

Since September 15th, I've been trying to upload my own photo to override the default image Technorati uses. Now that I'm looking closer at him, I don't think he's got a baseball cap on, I think he's got a yarmulke and a tumor that needs medical attention. In fact, you might want to med-vac him to the nearest emergency room...stat.

Despite a Web site confirmation at Technorati.com that tells me my new photo has been updated, this kid with the broomstick jutting out of his head is still smiling back at me.

I complained to Technorati support who replied to me on 10/5/05. Not exactly 24 hour turnaround. I know this isn't a life-threatening issue; we're not talking hurricane, oil shortages or terrorism. However, it's frustrating that a simple feature like a photo upload would require a 3 week turnaround for a response.

When the response did come it said:

We had a brief outage in our photo upload system that has since been
resolved.

Please try again, and if you still experience an issue please forward us
a copy of the image for further investigation.

Brief, huh? Well, I tried again and had the same problem. So, per their suggestion, I emailed the photo to them. No response.

It's now October 26th, about 6 weeks since I first requested help. I've sent several emails since then, including the image that I'd like to use, but no response from Technorati.

HELLO! TECHNORATI SUPPORT!! If you're out there, please take this photo and use it on my profile!! Stat!

Anyone else having this problem?

Rich Brooks
Hey, kid! Seriously, have that thing looked at.

Comments

[Tim]

Exact same problem here. Uploaded about three weeks ago. No help from Technorati. I'm still a kid with a silly hat on. :( No response from Technorati.

[Pete Quily]

I've had the same thing Rich. Kind of given up on the photos.

I've also had problem getting my blog listed on technorati's blog finder under the keyword "adult ADD", having emailed them several times over a 5 week period with no response other than "you may be having you will be contacted by a support technician once we have had a chance to review your message."

I shouldn't really have a problem getting listed under that keyword since:

1.I'm already listed on technorati with 35 links and have the Blog Finder tags configured correctly.

2.My blog url is adultaddstrengths.com

3.The name of my blog is Adult ADD strengths

4. I'm a google pagerank 5 with links from scoble and photo matt among others

5. 1,783 links in msn.com to my blog, and 159 blog posts.

Maybe technorati might be having financial troubles and can't afford the staff to run it properly, possibly due to increased competition like ice rocket, bloglines, the big search engines getting into the game etc.

Too bad since they have a nice feature set, but if they're not providing a reasonably timely indexing of blogs for their different features, that devalues the features, and makes it more likely that users will start spending more time exploring other blog search engines.

What's your preferred blog search engine?

[Rich Brooks]

I still like Technorati for searches, as I enjoy their interface.

However, been checking out IceRocket (http://wwwicerocket.com) and Google's Blog Search (http://blogsearch.google.com).

[muzagga]

I have the same problem. Now I deleted the guy with a stik in his ear, but I can not upload the picture i want to use.

I sent an email to them 3 week ago and recives a dealult reply message "thank you for bla bla.."

[Oliver]

Hey Rich, You must have read my mind...'been going through the exact same experience with the exact same and lame outcome. However, your witty letter made me temporarily forget about the annoyance - thanks for sharing!

[Backup]

That is funny, I found this post using the search phrase 'upload technorati profile image' on Tecnorati.

It is now Januari 2006 and still the profile image uploading is not working!!!

[PRS]

Did you ever manage to get your photo up? It's over a year since the last post here but I'm having the same problem with my account. Haven't been able to find any other mentions of this problem except on your blog!