Technorati Developer’s Salon

I attended the Technorati Developers Salon tonight in San Francisco. I arrived at a non-descript side entrance and rang an unlabeled call box. Kevin Marks answered the door, and I knew I was in the right place. After an hour of mingling, pizza, salad, and Anchor Steam, the group of about 40 people headed downstairs. Sputnik wireless access covered the entire two story office space. The office space is very large, considering Technorati employs only 8 people. They should be able to expand to 50 people at least in this office space. Dave Sifry started things off. Technorati picks up, on average, a new weblog every 7 seconds. They watch over 2.4 million weblogs and see about 200,000 updates a day. 8.2% of all the weblogs Technorati tracks update daily. 80% of weblogs ping Technorati. Kevin Marks presented observed trends in Technorati data. Graphs were posted on Kevin’s .Mac site and he has since removed the data. The top sites based on inbound sources were media companies such as New York Times. The graph Kevin showed looked very different than the Technorati 100. Ian Kallen showed an implementation of the Technorati API to show the current cosmos for the San Francisco Giants. Of course the question and answer period yielded some of the more interesting information of the night. Dave defined Technorati as a “user facing Internet service.” He is very intent on sticking to that vision and creating the best Internet service without getting distracted by other things. Technorati plans to make money from text advertising and subscription services. When asked to expand on advertising using Technorati, Dave did not have a concrete answer. If Technorati indexes a site with both a RSS and Atom feed they will use the Atom feed. Technorati will follow every entry’s link in order to gather the full HTML of your post. Atom defines whether the item description is the full post or a summary and is therefore easier for Technorati’s parser to digest. Technorati has link archives to 2002 and post archives since January. There are currently no plans to expire any of this data. The Developer wiki contains a full list of issues raised at the Developers Salon.