Why doesn't Technoratibot use RSS?

Technorati is "broken" yet again. For those of us who have been using it for a while, that's not news: it's more like the headache that constantly comes back, over and over again.

We all know that spidering and indexing content isn't easy. If it were, Technorati wouldn't break so often, would it? There's a LOT of content out here, people keep their home pages in all sorts of different formats, and Technorati or anyone else that wants to make sense of it can easily get confused about what's new and what isn't.

Google introduced Sitemaps some time ago to help them find content on our sites. As many webmasters use Sitemaps, Technorati could use the same file - it has more information than they want in terms of number of files, and less in terms of tags (I do wish Google would let us add content tags!), but it's better than reinventing the wheel..

But wait: the "wheel" that Technorati wants is new posts.. well, gee isn't that what RSS is for? Why on earth is that silly Technoratibot even looking at my index.html? It ought to be looking at my RSS feed.. either the default file it could learn from the index.html or I could tell it directly what RSS file to snag..

It could then go to the posts themselves to glean the Technorati tags.. why on earth do they complicate this?

So, recap: if you want to know everything there is to know about this or any other site, you should use something like Google Sitemaps. Ideally Google would be a good Netizen and allow new XML tags to be added to that so that we web-folk could use one file for everyone we want to provide such data for. If you just want to know what's new, RSS is the obvious answer.

Am I missing something? Am I nuts or are they?

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