Technokarma

Steve Rubel is picking up the technokarma question I have been poking at for the past few weeks today — see Micro Persuasion: You Can’t Take Your Technorati Links With You — where he says

This raises a bigger issue. Lots of bloggers and podcasters switch URLs and blog platforms. Still you can’t take your Technorati metadata with you. If you use FeedBurner you can redirect your old RSS feed to a new one. TypePad and other platforms let you export your posts. However, Technorati does not let you take what you have amassed somewhere else and port it to your new profile. This is wrong. When is Technorati going to step up and let us manage our reputations?

This is technokarma: I am a person who wrote all that stuff at Get Real, but that fact has no impact on the status of /Message. Which is crazy.

The focus of Technorati and other services on the physical dimension — files, links, trackbacks, etc. — leaves them blind to the underlying social reality. Those posts are written by people, they don’t just appear.

Technorati should explicitly create “technokarma” which is tied to individuals, not the physical location of blogs. So, when you start a new blog, or participate in a group blog, you do not start from zero.