Figleaf's Real Adult Sex

Well, Technorati has been broken since late summer. For weeks I couldn’t even do a manual ping and it still doesn’t index me reliably – but that has nothing to do with sex, only with their internal chaos.

I’m wondering WTF happened, because your blog is so evidently not porn. Either they have some idiotic bot flagging and deleting stuff – which would be really really stupid – or someone used really bad judgment (but in that case, why would they even come across your blog in the first place unless someone complained?). Or maybe someone judged your blog based solely on its title?

When I look at my Favorites list on Technorati, my other faves are still there. You’re not. Your last entry among my Favorites is this:

Something’s Gotta Be Wrong With This Picture: A Better Way to Bailout AIG?
http://www.realadultsex.com/archives/2008/11/somethings_gott…
21 days

and if I click on the link, I get this:
“We’re sorry…the post you’re looking for is unavailable.”

It’s as if they’ve wiped you out altogether.

If you’re trying to contact them, don’t expect email to work. The user forums are the only place I ever got a response: http://support.technorati.com/discussions/

Good luck with this.

[Thanks, Sungold. Last time I tried accessing their support forum the page timed out before it could load so… yeah, sounds like they’re struggling even more than usual. I’ll keep pitching away but Kochanie’s suggestion of icerocket, below, seems like a very nice alternative. —fl]

Hey, fl:

Just did a blog search for your site at IceRocket, and this lovely link came up in the results (zilch in the Technorati results). It comes from a blog entitled Millicent and Carla Fran:

The fact is, there’s precious little for someone like me on the internet. That is, writing that acknowledges that sex is frequently both hot and also hilarious. That there are some ethical issues that go beyond the basics of birth control, disease-prevention and consent. The big winner so far is a blog written by a “prudish libertine” called figleaf. The author writes intelligently and thoughtfully about the odd turns our sexual culture has taken, and how we’ve come to understand the sexual imagination. As a bonus, he includes slightly NSFW pictures of himself in virtually every post, as a way of single-handedly responding to a culture that insists on only sexualizing the female form, even to straight women.

[Wow! That’s very nice of them to say those things, but what’s really important is that they’re saying there’s not enough content on the internet that acknowledges that someone like them even exists. (I don’t even have to be modest to say that it would be great if there were a lot more people doing what I’m doing. Even if I was the best at what I do it’s not very impressive if I’m still the only one doing it. If that makes sense.0 Anyway, thanks for the link, Kochanie. —fl]

Logically, if any specific content triggered the problem, I don’t think it can be those rather recent posts. Technorati apparently stopped indexing Real Adult Sex 21 days ago, right after your post on AIG. I peeked in the archives and saw the next post was that oh-so-racy post by you, Kochanie, on becoming a refugee in Hungary! But I wonder if that title triggered some pedophile alert: “Imagine that you are a young boy.” Several posts later there’s a link to Male Submission Art, but no images there.

The irony is that it’s been a long time since you posted erotic fantasies or really explicit photos, figleaf. Why would Technorati pick on you now?

I wouldn’t blame you if you decided to just give up on them. I like being able to see if you’ve put up a new post, but to be honest I come here to read the comments anyway, so if you ditch Technorati it wouldn’t be any great loss.

[Good point, Sungold. I’ve got a spectacular group of commenters, present company included. Oh, and I might as well mention here that I figured out why my comment-response rate had started to suck so. I noticed a feature of my blogging software that let me add the comment thread to my RSS Newsreader. I thought it would help me keep track when new comments showed up. It did that but unfortunately it made it too easy to just read comments and promise myself I’d “get back to them” later for replies. This morning I deleted the feed from my newsreader and suddenly (since I tend to read comments individually and click “next” only after I’ve commented) I’m suddenly not just motivated to respond but… really enjoying it! Anyway, sorry I let technology make me less responsive! —fl]

Maybe it’s “Do not ask us to index objectionable, obscene, offensive content or content that promotes or displays pornography.”?

I wouldn’t say you’re obscene, but if one person who couldn’t tell the difference between “sexual” and “obscene” complained, that might do it.

I still have a Technorati. And I’m like way more obscener than you!

[Well, it could be that rule, eh? And while you are more obscener than I am I think you’re also more photographically discrete. Or maybe I just ticked someone off enough for them to flag me to Technorati. (I’ve noticed a lot of sites work on that sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell, but we’ll bust you if you get flagged” policies.) Thanks for the data point on what they do and don’t block, Holly. —fl]