Technorati all that reliable?

Is Technorati all that reliable as a source for listening to the Internet discussion? You’d like to think so if companies like Edelman are with partnering with Technorati to listen to the global conversation as lauded by Edeleman’s Steve Rubel and Dick Edelman and Peter Hirshberg of Technorati.

But my blog hasn’t been indexed by Tecchnorati in 27 days. That’s 45 posts ago. Until then, it was indexing fine. We have not done anything on the setup, I’ve pinged Technorati, emailed them & gotten no response. Other blogs in the LexBlog network get indexed fine, others not so fine. All with the same set up and automatic pinging of Technorati. Maybe LexBlog just sucks on what we’re doing to get indexed at Technorati, but I don’t think so.

The impact of Technorati not indexing RSS feeds, assuming they are the source of the problem, is significant. If I am monitoring a hot topic of discussion such as Baker & McKenzie’s preemptive strike, how do I know that Technorati is catching the RSS feeds discussing the issue? If I am publishing content of interest to journalists who are monitoring relevant keywords/key phrases, how do I know the journalists are seeing my feeds – the exact content they are looking for?

Aggregators such as Technorati, NewsGator, IceRocket and PubSub have never been 100% reliable. You’d pick up some feeds on one while they would be missing on another. But as one aggregator like Technorati picks up a strong brand, they could become of the aggregator of choice for the masses. But if they suck in indexing content that’s a problem for all – both blog publishers syndicating their feeds and those falsely believing they are monitoring feeds.

Update: Since posting, a couple recent posts of mine have been indexed by Technorati. It would be great if it continues.