Technorati and Pings

Technorati and Pings

Technorati is an Internet search engine for searching blogs, competing with Google, Yahoo and IceRocket. As of April 2007, Technorati indexes over 75 million weblogs. The name Technorati is a portmanteau, pointing to the technological version of literati or intellectuals.

Technorati was founded by Dave Sifry and its headquarters are in San Francisco, California, USA. Tantek Çelik is the site's Chief Technologist.

Technorati uses and contributes to open source software. Technorati has an active software developer community, many of them from open-source culture. Sifry is a major open-source advocate, and was a founder of LinuxCare and later of Wi-Fi access point software developer Sputnik. Technorati includes a public developer's wiki, where developers and contributors collaborate, as well as various open APIs.

The site won the SXSW 2006 awards for Best Technical Achievement and also Best of Show.[1] It was also nominated for a 2006 Webby award for Best Practices, but lost to Flickr and Google Maps.[2]

Criticism

In February 2006, Debi Jones pointed out that Technorati's "State of the Blogosphere" postings, which claimed that they track 27.7 million blogs, failed to take into account MySpace blogs, of which she says there are 56 million. As a result, she says the utility of Technorati as a gauge for blog popularity is questionable.[3] However by March 2006, Aaron Brazell pointed out that Technorati had started tracking MySpace "blogs".[4]

In May 2007, Andrew Orlowski writing for the tech tabloid TheRegister criticized Technorati's May 2007 redesign. He suggests that Technorati has decided to focus more on returning image thumbnails instead of blog results. He also claims that Technorati never worked in the past and the alleged refocus is "a tacit admission that it's given up on its original mission".

Ping

Ping is a computer network tool used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an IP network. Ping works by sending ICMP “echo request” packets ("Ping?") to the target host and listening for ICMP “echo response” replies (sometimes dubbed "Pong!" as a metaphor from the Ping Pong table tennis sport.) Using interval timing and response rate, ping estimates the round-trip time (generally in milliseconds although the unit is often omitted) and rate of packet loss between hosts (can differ).

The word ping is also frequently used as a verb or noun, where it can refer directly to the round-trip time, the act of running a ping program or measuring the round-trip time. See also: Ping (video games).

History

Mike Muuss wrote the program in December, 1983, as a tool to troubleshoot odd behavior on an IP network. He named it after the pulses of sound made by a sonar, since its operation is analogous to active sonar in submarines, in which an operator issues a pulse of energy (a network packet) at the target, which then bounces from the target and is received by the operator. Later David L. Mills provided a backronym, "Packet InterNet Grouper (Groper)" (sometimes also defined as "Packet Inter-Network Groper).

The usefulness of ping in assisting the "diagnosis" of Internet connectivity issues was impaired from late in 2003, when a number of Internet Service Providers filtered out ICMP Type 8 (echo request) messages at their network boundaries. This was partly due to the increasing use of ping for target reconnaissance, for example by Internet worms such as Welchia that flood the Internet with ping requests in order to locate new hosts to infect. Not only did the availability of ping responses leak information to an attacker, it added to the overall load on networks, causing problems for routers across the Internet.

There are two schools of thought concerning ICMP on the public Internet: those who say it should be largely disabled to enable network 'stealth', and those who say it should be enabled to allow proper Internet diagnostics.

These two schools of thought merge when considering intranet/extranet networks within the same organization. An example would be an organization which maintains 'buffer' network(s) to shield said net from the raw internet, such a network is usually described as a DMZ (after the military designation 'demilitarized zone'). In such a scenario an organization would maintain both a network(s) that would allow ICMP packets to radiate within the internal (trusted network[s]), and disallow ICMP (ping) packets in a separated network that would more often than not include raw internet facing systems.